Boston Strong

by Casey Sherman

  [9]

  FIRE AT FORUM

  While shocked onlookers were trying to make sense of what they had just seen and heard outside Marathon Sports, Bill Richard knew exactly what was happening. At first many believed they had witnessed a transformer explosion or a pyrotechnic display gone awry. Bill Richard knew it was a bomb. He also believed that his family would be safer on the street than standing on the sidewalk. At that moment, Bill was standing on the edge of Boylston Street against the barricade. He jumped the fence and reached immediately for the closest family member — his eleven-year-old son, Henry. Bill lifted the boy safely over the barricade and placed Henry beside him on the street. He then stretched his arms across the barricade once more and was knocked back by a wave of searing metal and intense heat. Broken nails, ball bearings, and chunks of the pressure cooker shot out like a hundred speeding missiles through the crowd outside Forum. The backpack had been placed directly behind eight-year-old Martin, and the boy took the brunt of the impact. Like the scene unfolding a block down the street, smoke and chaos filled the air outside Forum. Bill Richard stood on Boylston Street and saw what was left of his beautiful family. Martin was lying on the ground — alive, but just barely. He managed a whisper.

  “How is Jane?” he said faintly.

  Martin Richard then closed his eyes and died. A first responder — a firefighter from Lynn, Massachusetts — ran over and tried CPR on the little boy, but the chest compressions were of no use. He was gone.

  Eleven-year-old Henry, however, didn’t have a scratch on him under his singed clothes. The boy was always quick to elude his mother when she tried to clean his ears, and doctors would later say that the wax buildup actually saved Henry’s hearing. That was not the case for Bill Richard, whose eardrums were blown out by the explosion. He suffered ninety percent hearing loss in one ear and fifty percent in the other. Still, he and Henry were the least injured of the family. Bill fought the ringing in his ears and tried to stay focused on getting his loved ones help. He grabbed his daughter, Jane, and held her on his hip. The bottom half of the little girl’s left leg was missing. Jane was not severely bleeding — at first. Soon, the blood began to flow, and Jane was laid down on the street as first responders applied a makeshift tourniquet to her wound. The frightened little girl looked all around, wondering what had just happened. She needed her mom, but Denise was severely injured herself and couldn’t rush immediately to her side. At that moment, another woman stepped in and offered comfort.

  Tracy Munro was at the marathon to cheer on her uncle and others she knew who were running. Her young daughter, Stella, had created a big sign that read Go Uncle Robby! for Tracy to wave at the finish line. She had scored tickets to a private event at Abe & Louie’s restaurant, where she had enjoyed lunch and drinks with friends while waiting for her uncle to cross the finish line. Tracy was never big on crowds and had never gone to Boylston Street during the marathon before. This being her first time, she marveled at the excitement and the sheer thrill of being there. At 2:45 p.m., she left the restaurant and moved down the street toward Forum, where she and her cousins pulled out their cowbells and began cheering on the runners as they made their last strides toward the finish line. A group of soldiers from the Massachusetts National Guard jogged past her in full camouflage gear, wearing forty-pound backpacks. The troops called themselves the Tough Ruckers and ran the marathon to honor their fallen comrades who had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. As they crossed the finish line, there was a deafening boom.

  “Oh cool,” Munro said. “They’re firing cannons to salute the soldiers.”

  Moments later — a second explosion.

  “Brown, billowing smoke just shot up in the air,” she recalls.

  Still, Munro could not fathom that Boston was under attack. At first, she thought that the explosions were caused by a train collision or derailment on the tracks that ran underground along Boylston Street. Suddenly, a wave of spectators descended upon her. Her chest pounded and her eyes darted in all directions. She had to run or get crushed by the stampede. Munro dropped her handbag and ran down the sidewalk toward Fairfield Street, where she turned the corner and stopped with her back against the wall as hundreds of panicked spectators ran past. Munro took a few moments to gain her composure, and she realized that people had been hurt and that people needed help. She held her breath, found her will, and ran back in the direction of the smoke and stench of burning body parts and blood. Munro returned to Forum and was ill-equipped for what she witnessed.

  “I saw severed limbs everywhere,” she remembers. “People were screaming, their pants literally on fire.”

  Munro’s mind was racing, but everything was moving in slow motion in front of her. She spotted her handbag, which contained her cell phone, and knelt down to retrieve it. On her knees, she saw a child lying before her on the sidewalk. She immediately thought of her young daughter, Stella, and her parental instincts kicked into gear. As a man tried to apply a tourniquet to the child’s leg, Munro placed the child’s head in her lap. Staring down, she could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl. The child’s hair had been burned off. The child continued to look all around with terrified eyes.

  “Look at me, baby,” Munro said soothingly. “They’re taking care of you. What’s your name?”

  “Jane,” the girl replied softly.

  “How old are you?”

  “Seven.”

  Munro relayed the information to the first responders. “It’s a girl. Her name is Jane!”

  “I just stared into her eyes,” Munro recalls. “She wasn’t alone. I wanted her poor mother to know that a mom was taking care of her. Something aligned for me to be there at that moment.”

  Munro helped firefighters place the little girl into the ambulance. She saw Bill and Henry Richard, and her heart sank. “I realized that they had gone there as a family. Again, I thought of my Stella.”

  Munro returned to the sidewalk and tended to more victims. She took off her scarf and offered it as a tourniquet; she carried buckets of ice out of the restaurant to treat the wounded. She then noticed another child lying on the sidewalk. At this point, there was no one tending to his injuries.

  “Why aren’t we helping him?” she screamed. She peered into Martin Richard’s lifeless eyes and learned the crushing answer.

  Soon, someone would cover Martin Richard’s body with a sheet. This angered his mother, Denise, who was conscious — despite the fact that a projectile had pierced her right eye.

  “Don’t cover his face!” she yelled.

  Lingzi Lu had been standing close to Martin Richard. The twenty-three-year-old Boston University graduate student had fallen in love with the city during her short time in Boston. A product of China’s one-child policy, Lu was raised in the northeastern city of Shenyang with a passion for music and a mind for math. She attended Shenyang’s Northeast Yucai School before moving on to the Beijing Institute of Technology. Her parents urged her to apply to graduate school in the United States, and she was accepted to the statistics program at BU. After arriving in Boston in the fall of 2012, Lu created a photo gallery on her Facebook page. The title for the album: “New Beginning at BU.”

  The young woman with soft eyes and an engaging smile made friends easily with other Asian students, and had planned to spend the day with a small group of friends at the marathon — a spectacle she had never seen or experienced before. Lu’s spirits were high as she had just received word that she’d aced a big exam. She and her friends had found their way to Forum, and within minutes — Lu was gone. Dhzokhar Tsarnaev had claimed a second victim with his backpack bomb. Projectiles from the pressure cooker tore through the young woman’s lower body, killing her almost instantly. There should have been more deaths outside Forum, but much of the blast had been contained or halted by a large postal box that was bolted into the ground just a few feet away from Lingzi Lu and Martin Richard.

  As Heather Abbott approached the entrance of Forum she was startled by an
incredibly loud boom, followed by a cloud of smoke more than a block away. She turned, saw people running away from the noise, and knew immediately that something bad was happening. But before she could react, the second pressure cooker bomb exploded just a few feet away from her on the sidewalk. She was blown off her feet and catapulted through the front door and into the restaurant. There were others blown through the glass and into the restaurant, too.

  Smoke filled the air. It was dark. People screamed. Others ran. She landed on the floor and opened her eyes, wondering what the hell was going on.

  Heather thought to herself about the people running, How do they know where to go? How do they know there’s not another one? She was paralyzed with fear, but that quickly gave way to excruciating pain in her left foot. It felt like it was on fire.

  She tried to get up but couldn’t. Her foot was useless. She started crawling toward the back of the eatery and screamed out for help. She thought to herself that no one was going to come help her because everyone was literally running for their own lives. She was crawling on the floor just a few steps away from the patio, infected with fear and uncertainty. She thought she was going to die right there on the floor of Forum.

  But then a woman appeared next to her. She took her hand and touched her head. It was Erin Chatham, wife of former New England Patriot player Matt Chatham. She looked down at Heather’s destroyed foot and started to cry.

  “What’s your name?” Erin asked her.

  “Heather,” she replied.

  Erin and another woman grabbed her by the shoulders and began dragging her away from the doorway.

  “Matt!” Erin yelled, tears in her eyes. “Come quick!”

  The hulking, bald-headed ex-linebacker emerged and picked Heather up off the floor.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” Erin said, reciting the Catholic prayer. “Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus….”

  Matt Chatham carried her toward the rear of the restaurant and into a stairwell.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” Erin concluded. Others were running into the stairwell too.

  Heather couldn’t look down at her foot. She knew it was seriously damaged, if not gone completely. She saw a trail of blood behind them.

  Matt carried Heather down the stairs and outside into a back alley. Heather’s friend Jason was there.

  “That’s my friend. Give her to me,” Jason said.

  “No, she’s really hurt,” Matt replied.

  Dazed but somehow fully aware of her surroundings, Heather looked down at the ground. She saw drops of blood. She knew it was hers. Her friend Jessica was there, too. Jessica was crying. Matt put Heather down on the ground. Jessica, Jason, and some others gathered around her. Jessica laid her head on Heather’s head, tears streaming down her face.

  “I’m not going to leave you, Heather,” Jessica sobbed. “I won’t leave you.”

  Another friend held Heather’s head in his trembling hands. He looked at Heather’s foot.

  “Oh my God,” was the response.

  A surgeon and a nurse who happened to be at Forum came over. They used a belt to cinch a tourniquet tightly above Heather’s knee. It likely saved her life.

  She was in severe pain and kept wondering to herself where the ambulance was.

  Why is it taking so long? she wondered. She thought of her parents back in Rhode Island.

  The ambulance couldn’t get near the alley, so Matt Chatham carried her back through the restaurant to the front sidewalk where the bomb went off.

  Heather tried not to look, but she couldn’t help but see the blood. And the limbs — the bodies. She knew people were dead.

  Something very bad has happened, she thought to herself. What is going on?

  She held back tears and kept focused on staying awake. She just wanted to get to the emergency room.

  “What’s your name?” Erin Chatham asked her again. She kept asking Heather her name and where she was from to keep her talking — to keep her from slipping into unconsciousness.

  Across the street at the Mandarin Oriental’s VIP party, the mood had gone from joy and frivolity to utter panic. Just half an hour before, the party was slowing down as many of the suited CEOs, politicians, and philanthropists had finished their glad-handing and were off to other events. About two dozen remained in the spacious ballroom, enjoying the last remnants of the swanky buffet and — of course — gossiping. The innocent mingling was soon interrupted by a hellacious bang!

  “What the hell was that?” Megan Johnson asked aloud. No one seemed very concerned.

  Roughly twelve seconds later, a second explosion — infinitely louder — erupted just across the street. The guttural, bowel-shaking boom rocked the building. The giant windows, where just seconds earlier patrons had been watching runners go by, were now literally jiggling and waving from the impact of the blast. They look like pieces of rubber, Megan thought.

  Those sitting near the windows started walking away at a quick pace toward the back of the room and out the rear exit that filtered into the Prudential Center.

  “What’s going on?” Megan asked one visibly shaken passerby.

  Someone uttered the word bomb.

  “No way,” Megan said.

  She had assumed — as many did that day — that the VIP stands had collapsed or maybe a transformer had blown.

  Two minutes after the explosion, the Mandarin staff came into the room and started ushering everyone out into the glass vestibule that connects the hotel with the Prudential Tower and its adjacent mall. That’s when people started realizing that something was horribly wrong.

  Corralled into the glass walkway, scared and confused, people tried using their cell phones, but there was no service. Megan looked down from the walkway and saw a young girl sprawled out on the street in front of Max Brenner Chocolate Bar, a restaurant across the street. She was wearing a blue T-shirt and khaki-colored shorts and had blonde hair that was laid out underneath her head. Her legs were bent at the knee and pointed to the side. It looked like she was sleeping in the middle of the street.

  The only thing that seemed abnormal was a small red splash under her head, which Megan quickly realized was blood. She thought to herself that she must have been a jumper who had hurled herself off the building across the street. But everyone kept saying, to no one in particular, “It’s a bomb. A bomb.”

  The street below was chaos. There were tons of people running in every direction as police tried to gain control of the panicked situation. There were runners sitting on the side of the street, some nursing minor injuries and others huddled with their families.

  A group of people stood looking at the young woman lying on the cement. She was surrounded by police and EMTs.

  Cops with bomb-sniffing dogs soon showed up. Discarded bags were everywhere. Police started hustling people away from the scene, fearful one of the bags could contain another explosive. The area in front of Max Brenner and Forum, where just moments earlier people had been enjoying cocktails and lunch, was now filled with police vans, bomb squad officers, EMTs, firefighters, and ambulances.

  Megan saw several children crying but was struck by how many adults were clearly horrified by what they were witnessing. Some had their hands clenched into fists and were shaking and crying.

  Megan jumped on Twitter. Her hands were shaking hard as she started to type into her phone.

  “What is happening???” she tweeted.

  Within seconds news started flowing into her feed. People were replying to her tweet that two bombs had gone off. Her journalistic instincts kicked in, and she started snapping pictures and video of the scene and tweeted them out.

  “Two explosions at the marathon, I see one severely injured body,” she tweeted.

  A group of EMTs stood around an unidentified blonde woman in a circle. Megan wondered why they weren’t working on her. Why weren’t they helping her? />
  Within a few minutes, an ambulance backed into Megan’s view and she saw the woman loaded onto a gurney and put into the vehicle. It drove away.

  When the bombs went off, public relations executive Geri Denterlein, who was managing the guest list at the VIP party, was on an escalator in the attached Prudential Center, heading back to her office. She had just left the Mandarin and never heard the explosions, but as she reached the bottom of the escalator, a swarm of people ran toward her, some screaming and all looking terrified.

  Oh my God, what’s going on? she thought.

  Her phone began buzzing with calls from the media looking for information. Geri poked her head into Haru, a sushi restaurant on Boylston Street. The TV was on, and there was live coverage of the explosions.

  Confused and uncertain, she tried to head back to the Mandarin, but by then the entrance was sealed with yellow police tape and cops were evacuating the hotel. She headed to the Harvard Club on Commonwealth Avenue and set up shop, working the phones with hotel managers, executives, and the press.

  At 3:10 p.m., a voice came over the loudspeaker in the Prudential Center.

  “Can I have your attention, please. Public Safety is reporting … criminal activity on Boylston Street,” the voice said.

  Boston City Councilor Mike Ross had just left Marathon Sports and turned the corner onto Exeter Street when the first bomb went off.

  His ears were ringing. He turned toward the sound and saw a sea of humanity racing toward him. There were so many people that the councilor instinctively just ran with the crowd away from Boylston Street.