They were runners and spectators, police officers, medical workers and volunteers, buoyant from the energy of the crowd and the beauty of the spring day.
Until everything changed.
On Monday, April 15, 2013, two brothers staged a terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon, planting two bombs that exploded near the finish line and left three people dead and more than 250 injured. It was the start of a week of terror that ended in Watertown, Mass., with one brother killed and the other captured.
For many Granite Staters, this 10th anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings is more than a historical marker. It’s a time to remember those lost, and a moment that changed their lives.
‘I was bleeding’
Denise Spenard of Manchester was one of hundreds of spectators cheering on runners as they crossed the finish line when the bombs went off.
Spenard was with a group of friends watching the race at Atlantic Fish Company on Boylston Street.
“It started as a beautiful day, we were having fun. I had just ordered a martini — everything was perfect,” Spenard said in a recent interview. She and her friends had just moved to a table on the patio out front, ready to cheer on what she calls “my type of runners — not the elite ones, and not really slow.”
Then they heard an explosion.
“I remember my friend saying we need to get inside,” Spenard said. “I turned and felt something sharp hit me. That’s when the second one went off. I looked down and I was bleeding.”
Spenard remembers crawling inside and getting under a table. That’s when her friends realized she was injured; a piece of shrapnel from the pressure-cooker bomb had pierced her abdomen.
“I pulled my hand off and they could see it (blood) pumping out,” Spenard said.
Spenard and her friends ran toward the Charles River, knocking on car doors to find someone to drive her to a hospital.
She has never found the mystery man who gave her a ride. “I’m pretty sure he was a runner,” Spenard said. “He had a runner’s build, skinny, and he was sweaty, and had one of those bags the runners get.”
An X-ray would show that the piece of metal had punctured Spenard’s abdomen and was lodged inside. It didn’t hit any vital organs, and she was later released with the metal still in her body.
Spenard wasn’t able to have the shrapnel removed until Friday of that week.
“I needed to get that evil out of me,” she said.
The FBI took the piece of shrapnel as evidence.
‘Something happened’
Manchester Police Chief Allen Aldenberg was a member of the Massachusetts Army National Guard 10 years ago, commander of the 211th Military Police Battalion. He always looked forward to the annual mission of providing support for local law enforcement in towns along the marathon route.
April 15, 2013, was a good day, the chief remembers. Like everyone else, his soldiers were enjoying the festive atmos-phere.
Later that afternoon, Aldenberg was in the operations center in Lexington, Mass., getting ready to head home, when someone called out to him: “Something just happened at the finish line.”
“Our initial thought was a manhole cover had blown,” he recalled. “Then you start seeing footage. That amount of chaos does not really equate to a manhole cover.”
Aldenberg spent the rest of that day and the next two days deploying his soldiers where they were needed, first to secure the crime scene and later to guard the entrances to transit stations. “Honestly, it was more to offer a sense of security, to calm people down,” he said. “Kind of ‘keep America going.’
“They would come down and see two soldiers at every entry point and think, ‘OK, maybe I feel a little better.'”
Four days later, Aldenberg and his soldiers were in Watertown, Mass., searching house to house for the bomber.
‘We survived it’
Runner Michelle Collier instinctively hit the ground when the second bomb went off near the finish line.
It was the Bedford woman’s 48th birthday, and she had hoped to celebrate after finishing her lifelong goal.
After the explosion, Collier got up and ran the final few yards to finish in a time of 4 hours, 10 minutes and 39 seconds.
With cellphone signals jammed, Collier had trouble reaching her family and friends, but everyone ended up being safe.
It wasn’t the birthday celebration she had imagined. “The plan was to have a more fun, social gathering after the race — as opposed to, ‘Oh my God, we survived it,'” Collier said.
‘War injuries’
For more than 40 years, Jon Dana, director of sports medicine at the University of New Hampshire, has assisted runners who collapse or look like they might fall after crossing the finish line.
He was assisting a runner when the first bomb went off about 40 yards away.
He could smell the gunpowder.
Dana said he wasn’t prepared for what he experienced.
“It went from, ‘Geez, I hope that’s just a bad accident’ to ‘This is not good,'” he said. “It was clear that the race was not going to continue, so that is when I went to the bomb site to see if I could help.”
He helped stabilize two women with severe leg injuries.
“I had never been in that situation before,” he said. “I am an athletic trainer. I’ve seen nasty broken legs and arms, but I’ve never seen any war injuries. Nor did I ever expect to.
“It was a lot to process.”
Rodney Dunn of Merrimack was working as a paramedic for Armstrong Ambulance in Arlington, Mass., that spring. When the report of a bombing came in, he and his partner were sent to the scene.
“I remember thinking how terrible that was, and wondering what’s going to happen from here,” he said.
As they raced into Boston, people were flooding out to escape the terror. Dunn remembers wondering what else might be coming.
“That’s the thing that sticks with me the most,” he said. “That fear of another attack somewhere else.”
Fear was everywhere. There were reports of suspicious bags. No one knew who had planted the bombs.
“There was a lot of tension,” Dunn said. “Nobody knew where they were.”
He and his partner were assigned to transport a patient who had been hit by shrapnel to Tufts Medical Center. He was struck by how well first responders were handling the chaotic scene.
“Boston EMS is an impressive operation,” he said. “They had everything locked down and they had everything triaged.”
‘A harrowing afternoon’
Bill Ohm has worked at the Boston Marathon for 25 years, among an army of roughly 200 ham radio volunteers who back up the American Red Cross by relaying important and sometimes life-saving information between medical stations on the 26.2-mile course.
“It’s part of our training as amateur radio operators to help out where and when we can,” including dispatching communications for the Red Cross, Ohm said. “We have been doing that for decades.
Medical professionals, he said, are “not geeky radio people. That’s where we come in.”
Ohm, 76, is a retired electrical engineer and former three-term state representative from Nashua whose interest in ham radio was sparked when he assembled his first amateur radio from a kit as a boy in Chicago.
Asked to recall the 2013 race, Ohm was silent for a moment. Then: “I remember like it was yesterday,” he said. “It started as a typical day and ended up a harrowing afternoon.”
When the bombs went off, TV stations had already switched from live broadcasts to regular daytime programming, he recalled. “I am one of seven dispatchers for 24-plus Red Cross tents. The station chief comes in and says, ‘Hold up! Don’t say anything on the air. We just got reports that two bombs went off at the finish line.'”
That was the cue to go mute. “We all took a deep breath and knew we had to rely on our radio training now,” he said. “Clear communications. No emotions in the voice. Be a very, very good listener.
“We were told to stop all the runners at their next (Red Cross) location. None were allowed to progress to the finish line,” he said.
Buses were dispatched to pick up the runners. “After that, it was letting the public safety people take over,” Ohm said. “You need experienced, calm, collected communications because you don’t know what’s going to come your way.”
‘Things went wild’
Three days after the marathon, police were still searching for the bombers, and an uneasy quiet had settled over the greater Boston area.
Aldenberg had gone home to Manchester to get some rest, but that Thursday night he got a call: Something was happening in Watertown, Mass., and they needed the Guard.
“That’s where things went wild,” he said.
Aldenberg got to Watertown early Friday morning as law enforcement officers from all over were converging on the city. Watertown police had established a one-mile-radius perimeter, and officers were searching for the surviving bomber — “yard by yard, street by street, house by house,” he said.
SWAT teams from Manchester and the Seacoast had joined the search. Aldenberg helped arrange for two National Guard Black Hawk helicopters to watch from the sky.
When the door-to-door search turned up nothing, officials figured the bomber had somehow escaped, and Aldenberg headed home. “I’d barely gotten to the highway and my phone rang: ‘You’ve got to turn around. It looks like they found him.'”
A Watertown homeowner had called police to say that his boat in his backyard didn’t look right.
And that’s where 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev finally surrendered to an FBI hostage negotiation team.
Aldenberg was at the command post, set up in a strip mall parking lot when word came: “He’s in custody.”
“The whole parking lot just erupted,” he recalled. “Just pure joy.”
‘I don’t feel anything’
Spenard, who works for Easterseals New Hampshire, was invited along with other survivors by the Boston Athletic Association to run the marathon in 2014. She scoffed at the idea initially, then began to wonder if she could do it.
Spenard ran in 2014 but was overcome by dehydration around mile 18, and couldn’t finish.
She has run every year since, completing the 26.2 miles in all but one race (that one cut short due to injury).
Ten years on, her physical wound has healed. The only lingering trauma comes when she hears “loud, unexpected noises.”
“Fireworks, on the Fourth of July? Those are OK, I’m expecting those,” Spenard said. “It’s when something like a dumpster drops behind me, and I don’t know it’s behind me. That shakes me. I get this weird feeling throughout … and then I start crying.
“That’s the stuff I have to push down, and I can’t control it.”
Spenard said she doesn’t feel angry toward Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for what happened that terrible week. She doesn’t feel anything, she said.
“I really, truly feel numb,” said Spenard. “Maybe it’s because I survived, I don’t know. I don’t feel anything.”
‘Hugely emotional’
Michelle Collier said she feels safe visiting Boston for her photography business, but the emotions remain raw still to this day. Her family and friends always gather at some point on the weekend leading up to the marathon.
The Bedford runner has volunteered at the marathon twice since 2013, handing out foil blankets to the finishers.
“You are so busy helping out other people … that it is out of your mind,” Collier said. “But when you are walking down and just see the finish line and you see everything else, that’s when I’m like, ‘OK, this is where it was.'”
She participated in the “virtual” Boston Marathon held during the pandemic in October 2021, running on her regular training course. It wasn’t the same as running the real thing.
Collier has run other events that share the finish line with the Boston Marathon. “It is hugely emotional,” she said.
What she remembers most is what happened after the bombing.
“It was great the way the city came together,” she said. “It is unfortunate that sometimes it takes something so catastrophic for people to come together …”
“You still look at the things going on in the world and you’re like, ‘How are we still not in a better place?”
‘Life-changing’
In the blur of those anxious days that followed the bombings, one thing stands out in the mind of Merrimack paramedic Dunn — the defiant speech Red Sox slugger David Ortiz gave at the first home game after the attacks.
“This is our f—ing city,” Big Papi told the roaring fans. “And nobody’s gonna dictate our freedom. Stay strong.”
What happened 10 years ago has made Dunn, who now works for Milford Ambulance, more vigilant. “It’s made me try to be a little bit more aware of situations around me, whether at work or not at work,” he said. “Just to be aware of things that are out of place.”
UNH’s Dana admits he still has trouble making any sense of what happened back then. He looks at mass casualty events differently now.
“That sort of naivete is gone,” he said. “I understand that those things can happen.”
It’s the same for Chief Aldenberg.
“No part of the world, no part of this country, is immune to something like that happening,” he said. “You’re dealing with people who have that mindset, who are set on their cause.”
Aldenberg said he chooses to remember the victims on this 10th anniversary weekend, those who lost lives and limbs that day.
Even those who weren’t physically hurt were traumatized, Aldenberg said. “I saw sheer panic on people’s faces,” he said.
“I think about how loud the crowd is as the runners are coming in,” he said. “Everyone’s cheering and having a good time, and then boom.
“Life-changing,” he said.
Monday will be Bill Ohm’s 26th year as a Boston Marathon radio operator. He said he still feels a sense of pride and accomplishment from volunteering.
“The people at the Red Cross are such dedicated volunteers, and they could use some help,” he said.
Manchester’s Spenard will run Boston again on Monday but plans to take “a couple years off” after this one. She said she runs without fear of another terrorist attack.
“If this happened to one of my kids, I would probably feel completely different and would probably have an evil attitude,” Spenard said.
“Could it happen again? Yeah, but I can’t dwell on it,” she said.
“I don’t want to live my life like that.”
___
(c) 2023 The New Hampshire Union Leader
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
