American among 14 dead in attacks

PARIS — The dead and injured in Barcelona were a snapshot of the world — men, women and children from 34 nations — testifying to the global appeal of the sunkissed city.

Families, friends and government officials from Paris to Sydney, San Francisco to Berlin scrambled Friday to discover whether their loved ones and citizens were among those mowed down by suspected Islamic extremists who zigzagged down Barcelona’s always-crowded Las Ramblas promenade in a van, killing 13 people and injuring 120 others.

A related attack early Friday morning in the popular Spanish seaside town of Cambrils, south of Barcelona, took the death toll to 14.

Jared Tucker, 42, of Lafayette, California, was among those killed in the Barcelona attack, his father said Friday.

“We just got the text — Jared’s body was identified at the morgue by his wife,” Daniel Tucker told the Daily News of New York.

Jared Tucker and his wife, Heidi Nunes-Tucker, 40, were celebrating their first wedding anniversary with a visit to Barcelona. Nunes, 40, told NBC News that she and her husband had drinks in an outside restaurant along the Las Ramblas strip and briefly separated. That’s when a white van jumped the curb onto the walkway and sped down the center of Las Ramblas.

Nunes, a schoolteacher, told NBC that during the attack she was pushed into a souvenir shop by crowds of screaming people running from the area.

Jared Tucker had three daughters, his father said.

The State Department said an American also was injured, but it did not identify that person.

Names of 10 of the dead had emerged: five Spaniards, two Italians, a Portuguese, a Belgian and Tucker, the American.

A regional government statement said 59 people were still in the hospital late Friday, of which 15 were in critical condition and 25 in serious condition.