Bomb Blast in Boston Marathon
BOSTON: About 100 feet from the end of the 26.2-mile Boston Marathon, explosions shook the street and sent runners frantically racing for cover. The marathon finish line, normally a festive area of celebration and exhaustion, was suddenly like a war zone.
“These runners just finished and they don’t have legs now,” said Roupen Bastajian, 35, a Rhode Island state trooper and former Marine. “So many of them. There are so many people without legs. It’s all blood. There’s blood everywhere. You got bones, fragments. It’s disgusting.”
Had Mr. Bastajian run a few strides slower, as he did in 2011, he might have been among the dozens of victims wounded in Monday’s bomb blasts. Instead, he was among the runners treating other runners, a makeshift emergency medical service of exhausted athletes.
“We put tourniquets on,” Mr. Bastajian said. “I tied at least five, six legs with tourniquets.”
The Boston Marathon, held every year on Patriots’ Day, a state holiday, is usually an opportunity for the city to cheer with a collective roar. But the explosions turned an uplifting day into a nightmarish swirl of bloodied streets and torn-apart limbs as runners were toppled, children on the sidelines were maimed, and a panicked city watched its iconic athletic spectacle destroyed.
The timing of the explosions — around 2:50 p.m. — was especially devastating because they happened when a high concentration of runners in the main field were arriving at the finish line on Boylston Street. In last year’s Boston Marathon, for example, more than 9,100 crossed the finish line — 42 percent of all finishers — in the 30 minutes before and after the time of the explosions.
This year, more than 23,000 people started the race in near-perfect conditions. Only about 17,580 finished.
Three people were killed and more than 100 were injured, officials said. Late Monday night, Brigham and Women’s Hospital said it had seen 31 patients who were wounded in the explosions, ranging from a 3-year-old to patients in their 60s. As many as 10 were listed in serious condition, and 2 were in critical condition.
