THE BIG READ: After the horror
BRIAN Sugrue knew what to do once he got his head together. But, unfortunately, that was because the last time a terrorist bomb struck the United States, he was a little too close for comfort then as well.
As a teenager, he was supposed to visit the Pentagon on Sept 11, 2001. When everything shut down that unforgettable morning, it took him much too long to find his father who was also in Washington DC that day to attend a conference.
On Monday, the now four-year Bostonian, originally from Blackrock in Co Dublin, had his digital camera rolling as he reached the finish line on Boylston Street. That’s the way he had chosen to run for much of the previous 26.1 miles. Despite being an international triathlete who represented Ireland last October at the World Championships in New Zealand, and even though he has the Dublin and Paris marathons under his belt, this was a day to enjoy the sights and sounds, the incredible atmosphere of Patriots’ Day and its great old race.
“I stayed fit during the winter, but I definitely chose to ease back after the triathlon,” he said when I reached him on Thursday. “I finished 13th in New Zealand which I was delighted with. But I was looking forward to just enjoying this day.”
His girlfriend and his cousin cycled along the streets of Boston beside him for much of the race. He wanted a picture of everyone in a good costume.
That’s why he was on pace for a running time that has now become interwoven with the history of this city. He slowed up to walk those last few yards, switched his camera on again and began to shoot. He wanted to remember everything.
Within 15 seconds the first bomb went off.
“There are terrible … sights on that video,” he said quietly, still shaken up from all he saw. “I’m not really sure people want to hear about it or read about it. I’ve handed it over to the authorities and I want nothing more to do with it.”
Although he came closer to the finishing line than so many thousands who were held back, the 27-year-old investment manager never finished the race.
Instead, he came face to face with utter misery and now he remembers too much.
“I really saw more than people could ever be prepared for,” he eventually explains having hesitated for a few seconds. “I saw people with clothes blown off. My most vivid image is of this man who walked right past me. He had blood on his face. His clothes down along one side were blown off. He seemed basically fine but the look in his eyes — he was shocked and, of course, the blood. And that’s the mild version of events.
“I was on the opposite side of the street. It’s four lanes wide and that was probably the main reason I was 100m away from the blast. Of course none of the runners was significantly injured.
“But it was still too close for comfort and it was harrowing to witness what people went through. You can’t prepare yourself for something like that,” he adds, trailing off a little.
His parents back in Dublin have rallied around him and his older brother too.
“They’re helping me to talk about it. They’re reassuring me that it’s OK to talk about it and work it through.”
And, of course, his compatriots during the happier phase of that day are there for him too: his cousin and his girlfriend.
The 9/11 experience ever fresh in his mind, as soon as he saw the “network error” graphic on his phone he realised that communication was impossible and that it was essential to adhere to the pre-arranged meeting point he had with his girlfriend and his cousin.
But first he had to battle through his own panicked state of mind.
“I don’t have a sense of ‘what if’, I’m not allowing my mind to go there. I’ve managed to realise and believe that it would never have been possible to get caught up directly. I guess that compartmentalises everything for me.
“But the proximity is still too much to take. I was stunned. It was completely out of context and then I realised there was nothing I could do to reverse it, to help make it stop. I fell into an unbelievable panic and I just simply didn’t want to be there on my own. They were clearing people out so they could get emergency crews in. I couldn’t get through to my girlfriend and my cousin. That made me more hysterical.”
He stopped trying to call them and called on his legs to give him one last burst of energy. He had just run most of the marathon but he still had a sprint in him.
“I checked my call log on my phone the following day and that whole period of panic lasted about 15 minutes. It was too much time to see more than I wanted to see.”
It ended up being a six-hour trip back to his hotel in DC amid the chaos of that autumn day almost 12 years ago. It wasn’t going to happen like that again.
“I knew there would be a lockdown and the subway would close. It turned out that our meeting point was within the 15-block radius that they shut down. I just wanted to get to them and get the hell out of there. Just be safe together.”
It was 25 long minutes before his parents got a hold of him and his cousin reassured people through his Facebook page: “We’re all safe. We’re getting out of the city.”
Sugrue admits to being overwhelmed by the outpouring from those that knew him and were worried about him. They had done the math, he says, and it didn’t look so good that he had gone through the 40km mark 12 minutes before the bombs changed the day entirely.
“In time I’ll deal with it in different ways. But I can’t watch all the coverage of the aftermath. I’m not ignoring it, I’m just trying to keep a safe distance.
“Before Monday, I had already decided to run next year’s marathon. Now my resolve has been steeled. I’m more determined. I have run it in around three hours and I’ll look to beat that.
“You’ve probably heard it from a lot of people around the place this week: this city is resilient. People are geared up more than ever now. The atmosphere will be even better. This is the oldest annual marathon in the world. And yes, as everyone keeps repeating, it has been permanently changed. But there’s already a strong sense that next year will be incredibly special.”
Then there were the competitors who finished immediately after the explosions. The achievement they had trained so long and hard for became immediately hollow.
On Wednesday, there was a strange and almost relaxed atmosphere close to the huge crime scene. It seemed to overlay the tension and was only ended by the farce which erupted around inaccurate reports of an arrest followed by a bomb hoax at a courthouse full of insatiable media.
At the corner of Dartmouth and Stuart, a policeman stopped the food delivery guy from Emilio’s and shouted “Where’s my pizza?”, drawing chuckles from pedestrians. If it hadn’t been for all the TV trucks and the large white tent down towards Copley Square, this would have felt as normal as any spring day.
Up the street, away from the square and the media circus, a group of friends huddled around some beers next to the large open window of Clearys pub, that familiar Dublin clockface forming part of the exterior design. Each of them wore a marathon medal and Andrew Dupee (pictured right) even wore the blue and yellow colours of the race association.
He and his friend and work colleague Kelly Whittaker had finished the race together, just three seconds after the first bomb. They were two of the last runners to struggle over the line.
They were back now, less than two days later, to pick up their bags and their well-earned souvenirs.
“I really wanted to do something to mark my 40th year,” Dupee said as his burger arrived in front of him.
He had raised more than €5,000 for Jumpstart, a charity that helps young kids prepare for early education. Whittaker, who works with him at an investment firm, was an experienced runner who had trained and raised money with him for months. The weather was in their favour and after the initial confusion at the start of the race, she caught up with him with about six miles gone and they carried on together.
At Mile 15, Dupee moved to the side of the course and embraced his twin girls, Mia and Abby, his wife Keira and his good friends Jeff and Teri Lazzarino — Jeff brought the Spiderman helium balloon like he had promised in order to make finding them a lot easier.
“It was my happiest moment of the day,” he said as his eyes welled up.
Later when the city barrier was breached, Whittaker saw her mother at the foot of Heartbreak Hill and knew her father, who had watched her train all winter, would be at the finish line at her usual time, in and around 4:10.
The Red Sox had won and the Fenway Park crowds were roaring them on. Dupee spotted his wife again as she screamed his name and he continued on to the straight run home. He and Whittaker had done it, completed a tough race in the time they had hoped for. But they never got to congratulate each other, they didn’t have a chance to high five or even so much as look at each other.
“I heard a massive boom,” said Dupee. “It reminded me of the cannon they used to fire at the Constitution every evening which we would hear in the Charlestown Navy Yard. I turned my head, and saw a huge plume of smoke about 40 feet behind us and I knew it was a bomb. There was no question in my mind. About five seconds later we saw the second explosion and a fireball. I clenched both of my fists in anger and screamed ‘fuck!’ Then I looked at Kelly and said ‘That was a terrorist attack,’ we need to leave now.
“My wife was directly across the street so I wasn’t panicked about her. You could tell it was contained. Kelly kept saying ‘my dad is in there’. She couldn’t move — she was in shock.”
They headed towards the medical tent and guessed it wouldn’t be long before the trauma victims would be brought in, so they crossed over to the Westin Hotel reunited with their other team mates and eventually, thankfully, Keira and Whittaker’s father, who, mercifully wasn’t where he was supposed to be by the bomb zone because he had been held up at a meeting. In a subsequent email, Dupee shared a further thought: “I know this city. It’s a proud place and on Marathon Day we welcome the world into our backyards and into our hearts. The history of this race is part of the fabric of who we are. That can never be taken away.”
Across town, meanwhile, the staff of the Irish Consulate were enjoying their first lunch together. Ever.
Due to their opening hours, they’d never sat down for lunch in each other’s company until Wednesday, two days after their office on Boylston Street was closed down by the attack.
“It took a crisis to bring us together,” smiled consul-general Michael Lonergan.
Press officer Ciaran Delargy was monitoring Twitter and word was filtering through that an arrest had been made and that a suspect was being taken to a court in South Boston.
Not only had they been through hours of upheaval on Monday, their consular duties were now in overdrive. Within 25 minutes of the news breaking, Mr Lonergan was fielding his first call from a Dublin daily newspaper.
In on top of it all, they, like many, were eager to account for the 108 Irish citizens registered to compete. “It was relatively easy to track down the Irish who had travelled over from Ireland because they were in groups. It was more difficult to be certain about the resident Irish citizens. We had a sense, though, from the police and eventually we confirmed everyone within a few hours.”
It’s almost business as usual, though. Emergency passports are still being applied for and notifying people about their changed circumstances has to be filtered out as comprehensively as possible. “It helps that the Irish community here is connected in some way. Our Twitter account was very useful getting information out and this is the first big event for it. We were trending in Ireland at one stage.”
They might have had a job to do but it didn’t mean they couldn’t worry about their home town.
“I wonder about the motive of this act. Boston is an open, tolerant, liberal city. We don’t have divisive politics here. There’s no debate over gun control. It just doesn’t make sense.”
It’s also a sports-obsessed town which added a cruel irony given the fact that it was near where all this horror originated.
If anything could redress the injustice, it would be sport too. The Boston Celtics basketball team left their season incomplete by canceling their final regular season game. Their compatriots at the TD Garden arena, the Boston Bruins ice hockey team, postponed Monday’s game. And then on Wednesday evening it was a Bruins game which helped the city regain its composure and collective pride on a national scale.
Walking along State Street, I chanced upon a couple of Bruins fans moseying to the Garden early. Husband and wife, Tim and Annmary Keating, wore jersey number 46 of Bruins player David Krejci and his team mate, number 20, Daniel Paille.
The sun was still sending shadows across the beautiful facades of the store fronts and they were approaching the waterfront arena with heads held high.
“This is the best way to bounce back,” said Tim. “We love our Bruins and I think tonight could be special.”
He wasn’t wrong. The longtime pre-game national anthem singer Rene Rancourt, in a rare and unique moment, stopped singing and the organ stopped playing as the spectators joined in in full voice. Then he conducted 17,565 fans as they gave ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ everything they had.
As SL Price wrote in Sports Illustrated in the past few days: “No city, not even New York, is more obnoxious in its (sports) pride. And no city knows how to make such a lunatic misplacement of priorities feel so perfectly right.”
“It was incredible,” Boston star Brad Marchand told reporters even though his team lost 3-2 against Buffalo. “You really see why Boston’s such a special city. Everyone’s come together and united through all this, and tonight’s another example of it. You’re out with thousands of people you don’t know but it’s like we’re all one.”
On Tuesday night in Dorchester, another sort of community came together as well. But the pain was even closer to home. Thousands of residents in the relatively heavy Irish-American area of Neponset gathered at Garvey Park. This was where one of the three bomb victims who lost their lives, eight-year-old Martin Richard, played football. His mother was in a critical condition. His sister lost a leg. The world had read about their tragedy but this community was living side by side with it.
“It’s just heart-wrenching,” Maria Deltufo told the local newspaper, The Dorchester Reporter. “The whole community — it’s really touching home for everybody. It’s hard to fathom that it happened in the first place … The whole family is now destroyed senselessly.”
On Thursday at a busy Sonny’s Pub, voices hushed as the television volume was raised. Yet another press conference from within the city that lies to the north, just up Interstate 93. But this time, a real pair of suspects was being revealed by the FBI.
Worn out from being the centre of so many news cycles, one more reporter with a notepad was the subject of suspicious eyes. The Richard family had asked everyone to respect their privacy and that was being honoured completely.
But they did speak off the record in glowing terms and with tear-filled eyes about the misfortune that had befallen their slice of suburbia. Walking up Miot Street and onto Carruth, the spring air made everything seem calmer and more comfortable. Life, of course, was moving on, but as Miot became Van Winkle Street and Carruth Street cut across, the lone police car standing guard on an otherwise deserted road pinpointed the sorriest house in South Boston.
Later that evening, the sirens began again as more chaos erupted in Watertown near Cambridge on the northside of the river. The information came fast and the images were looped while the great city of Boston wondered anew whether it would ever be the same.
