Tom and other Boston Marathon witnesses describe being near the finish line during the 2013 explosions. Tom ran toward his family during evacuation while another witness had crossed the finish line minutes before the blasts.
you first. Where were you? What'd you see?
I was rounding the corner on Boylston Street. I was heading towards the finish line. Explosions occurred, and, uh, I knew exactly what happened immediately when it happened. My first concern was my family. Uh, they were on the other side of the bomb, so I ran towards the bomb to get to my family. I was, um, taken off the street by Boston's, uh, uh, police department. They did a really good job of evacuating the area. I kind of resisted a little bit because I needed to get to my family. And then I ended up running through the back alleys. As I was running through the back alleys, the restaurants and bars were evacuating. And there was just blood and people screaming and people crying. I eventually made it to my family and we got out of Boston.
We evacuated. Tom, I imagine you saw sort of a similar scene.
I had actually just crossed the finish line about 2 minutes before, was about 50 feet from the finish line when the first explosions went off. We had a different experience than the marathon runners who were crossing the finish line, had looked back, we heard the explosion, we saw the smoke, but we really didn't know what exactly had happened. I was next to a young woman who had served in Iraq, and we both kind of thought the same thing about an IED. But couldn't possibly imagine that that was what was actually happening. We dismissed it as some other type of accident. The Marathon folks kept people very, very calm. They moved us through away from the blast. No one really was talking about what happened. Nobody, I think, really knew what had happened. So it was a little bit different scene for us right after the explosion on the other side of the finish line.
