Boston Strong

by Casey Sherman

  “I went to the closest victim to me,” he said. He came across a high school student, Sydney Corcoran of Lowell, Massachusetts, who had been watching the marathon with her mother, Celeste, and father, Kevin. The raven-haired teenager was lying on the ground, conscious and crying. She had a massive shrapnel wound to her right thigh with arterial bleeding.

  Another firefighter handed Skrabut an orange scarf, which he tied above the wound as a tourniquet. He also applied direct pressure to try to stop the bleeding. A spectator who said he was a Marine came over and asked how he could help.

  “I had him place his hands where mine were and told him to squeeze as hard as he could,” Skrabut wrote. “If not for him, I would have had to stay and hold pressure on her leg,” Skrabut wrote. “His actions no doubt kept her from bleeding to death.”

  He then moved to another victim, a middle-aged man who was conscious and was trying to get up. He appeared to have a broken right leg and multiple shrapnel wounds to the face and body, but no life-threatening injuries. “Calm down, sir, and try to breathe normally,” Skrabut told him. “Lay still until help arrives.”

  He then turned to a woman in her late 20s or early 30s. She had a severely deformed lower left leg with a blast wound and an open leg fracture. Her right foot was twisted inward, and her ankle joint was exposed. It was a horrific injury. He grabbed her left leg above and below the wounds and held her. A marathon runner arrived.

  “I believe he had a medical background because he immediately took control of patient care, calling off her injuries very systematically and calmly,” Skrabut wrote.

  It was the firefighter who then began taking directions from the civilian. The marathoner asked him for gauze, so Skrabut gave him a roll from his medical pouch.

  “Straighten her left leg and wrap the wound,” the marathoner told Skrabut. He then did the same with her right ankle and foot. The marathoner then instructed the firefighter to lift her legs, and he wrapped her hips and legs together so she could be moved. She was put on a backboard, and Boston EMS came over with a stretcher and took her away.

  The firefighter never got the name of the marathoner.

  “But I am grateful for him to say the least,” he said.

  Just before the bomb blasts, firefighter Doug Menard, a veteran of the Iraq war, was on roving patrol on the block bordered by Dartmouth, Boylston, and Exeter streets. He was on Exeter Street just past Marathon Sports heading toward Dartmouth Street when the first bomb went off. He was about fifteen seconds away from the scene when the explosion occurred.

  “The blast was enough to feel like someone kicked out the back of my knees, however I was able to catch my balance,” Menard wrote in a report.23 “I turned immediately and saw a rush of running wounded coming toward me through the smoke. I seemed to be the closest person to ground zero who didn’t have a scratch on me.”

  Before he processed what was happening, he heard the second boom!

  “D110 at the finish line. Multiple wounded. Secondary devices. Watch out,” Menard barked through the radio. He saw roughly twenty people with severe lower leg wounds on the pavement. As he surveyed the scene, he mentally “black tagged” one female — Krystle Campbell — who appeared “gray” and “didn’t look like she was going to make it.”

  Campbell was a twenty-nine-year-old golden-haired native of Medford, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. She had been a top employee of celebrity chef Jasper White in his Summer Shack restaurants, sometimes working seventy to eighty hours per week managing the catering side of the business, which was quite extensive. She was the all-American girl who loved her friends and family. Krystle had taken care of her sick grandmother for nearly two years, and on the day of the marathon she was just a few weeks shy of her thirtieth birthday.

  As Menard stood near Krystle, a mother grabbed his leg.

  “She was covering her teenage daughter’s leg,” Menard wrote. He looked down at the girl’s leg and saw it was severed just below the knee. He found a cravat in his medical pouch and tied a tourniquet.

  “The blood stopped and I moved on, even though the girl and her mother pleaded for me to stay,” he wrote. Everyone needed help.

  A man next to them was on fire. He had smoke rising from his shoulders and his clothes were ablaze. Menard patted out the flames and checked him for wounds. He had deep cuts -shrapnel wounds to his back. His tattered shirt kept smoking from the “hot shrapnel” in his back.

  A Boston cop arrived to help and kept patting out the smoking garments while Menard moved on to other wounded. He went back to Krystle Campbell, where another woman, who turned out to be her friend Karen Rand, was holding her hand. Karen and Krystle had come to the marathon to watch Karen’s boyfriend finish the road race. Menard noted that Karen’s lower leg was “blown apart.”

  He didn’t have another cravat, but a runner sprinted over and handed the firefighter his running belt. Menard and the runner tied a tourniquet around her leg. A marathon volunteer handed him multiple rolls of gauze, which could also be used for tourniquets. Despite their efforts, Karen later lost the leg.

  An EMT asked Menard to help cut off a patient’s clothing. As he assisted the medic, someone yelled for help inside Marathon Sports. He ran through the shattered front window of the store and found five injured people. Michelle L’Heureux was among them.

  There were civilian doctors working on a woman in the doorway. Menard grabbed a gauze roll and put a tourniquet on the woman’s leg. The firefighter and a couple of civilians helped him drag the woman out of the store and onto the sidewalk so that EMTs could take her to the hospital. He then ran toward another firefighter who was working on a man with serious injuries. Menard helped his fellow firefighter put the man on a backboard, and they carried him to the medical tent in Copley Square.

  He rushed back to the scene, but by then all the wounded had been evacuated. In the last comment in his report, Menard notes that he then heard a radio broadcast about a possible third device.24

  Another Boston firefighter, Mike Foley, was busy saving lives in front of Forum. After the second blast, he hopped the barricade and came upon a man whose clothes were on fire. He also saw a child and a woman — later identified as Martin Richard and Lingzi Lu — lying on the ground. They were dead. Foley saw a severed foot on the ground next to the curb and felt nauseous. “The ground was dark — scorched from the explosion and covered with blood and tissue,” he recalls.25

  He came across a man with amputations, who was trying to sit up. Foley grabbed a strap from an EMT and fashioned a tourniquet to the man’s right thigh. He waved over a cop.

  “Run to the engine and grab me a Stokes basket,” he hollered. A Stokes basket is a metal and plastic stretcher used to move patients. They lifted the man onto the basket and slid him into a waiting ambulance.

  Foley ran back to the scene and helped an EMT load another severely injured patient onto a backboard, then carried him to an ambulance that had more room. He rushed back and helped EMTs load yet another patient into a police van. He gave another survivor oxygen and helped place her into the same police van.

  He then helped direct trucks and ambulances to and from the scene before he was ordered to head back to Engine 33’s headquarters on Boylston Street to “take cover from a possible third device.”

  Firefighter Adalberto Rodriguez thanked God that he had made the decision earlier that day to carry his medical bag. Patrolling the area between Hereford and Fairfield streets, he was keeping an eye out for dehydrated runners and spectators in need of assistance. He’d helped a few dehydrated folks that morning, as well as a couple of people with “flu-like symptoms,” but it was an otherwise uneventful day. That would soon change as he would be thrust into the chaos and tasked with helping rescue one of the most vulnerable of the marathon-day victims.

  After the blasts, Rodriguez sprinted toward Forum, where he saw people tearing down metal partitions to get to the wounded. He helped a man with shrapnel in his legs. Rodriguez cut the man’s
pants off and cleaned and wrapped his wounds. He was then directed to a little girl who’d lost her left leg — it was Jane Richard. The stunned firefighter held pressure on the arteries above the girl’s injury. He helped put her on a gurney, and the girl was taken away in an ambulance. His attention turned to the girl’s father, Bill Richard, who was holding his son Martin in his arms, wailing.

  “Don’t let him die, don’t let him die!” the father cried.

  Rodriguez’s heart ached at the sound of Bill Richard’s screams. He bent down and examined Martin’s injuries and was certain the boy was already gone. Still, he tried to calm the anguished dad as best he could, but Bill Richard was inconsolable.

  Another boy suffering from severe leg lacerations was lying next to Martin. Rodriguez assumed it was the boy’s brother. But it wasn’t. It was eleven-year-old Aaron Hern, a California boy who had been standing next to Martin at the time of the explosion. The same shrapnel that tore through Aaron’s leg had killed Martin. Tourniquets were tied around Aaron’s leg, and the boy was led to an ambulance. Rodriguez moved onto another victim.

  His third patient was an adult male “with shrapnel all over his entire body.” The man had severe injuries to his left leg. Rodriguez quickly wrapped the man’s wounds to slow the bleeding and helped get him into a police van.26

  He ran back to the scene and saw EMTs giving CPR to a woman who lay motionless on the sidewalk. He later learned the woman was BU graduate student Lingzi Lu. Several people were tying tourniquets around her wounds, desperately trying to save the young Chinese woman. But Lu’s injuries were far too severe. She was bleeding out rapidly. Seconds later, she was dead.

  Up the street, Boston firefighter James Plourde was climbing through the wreckage toward a candy store, Sugar Heaven, where dazed spectators had taken refuge.

  “If you can walk, get out,” he yelled into the store. A few people darted past him into the street.

  There was a young woman inside with a deep laceration that appeared to be a partial amputation. Plourde and a spectator tied off the wound with a tourniquet. He then carried the young girl to safety. Her name was Victoria McGrath, a twenty-year-old Northeastern University student who was at the marathon with friends. Victoria’s leg was saved, and pictures of the firefighter carrying the blood-covered young woman went viral as a symbol of the heroism of the day.

  In the middle of Boylston Street, Plourde surveyed the gruesome scene. “There were bodies and blood as far as I could see on the sidewalk,” he wrote in a report.27

  There was an older man on the ground with three people kneeling around him. There were two men with below-the-knee amputations, and no one was tending to them. He knelt down and tried to apply pressure to a woman’s severe lower leg injury. He took out his knife and cut a jacket he found on the sidewalk to make a tourniquet.

  “This one’s still on fire!” a woman yelled, referring to a man smoldering on the sidewalk. Plourde moved on to him and saw more people with apparent amputations.

  “Everyone gets a tourniquet!” he shouted to other first responders. People handed the firefighters belts.

  Carlos Arredondo was not a firefighter. Rather, he was one of dozens of volunteers and spectators who, without thought, put the needs of others ahead of their own on Boylston Street that day. The fifty-three-year-old native of Costa Rica was working the finish line with his friend John Mixon of Ogunquit, Maine. The pair were there to hand out American flags to spectators and to cheer on runners from Mixon’s organization, Race for the Fallen Maine. The group had five marathoners running the race to honor soldiers from Maine who have been killed while serving overseas. Carlos’s son Alexander of Bangor, Maine, and Randolph, Massachusetts, was one of the fallen. The twenty-year-old Marine was killed in action in August 2004 during an intense firefight in the Iraqi city of Najaf, about one hundred miles south of Baghdad. Carlos was at his home in Florida when a Marine van pulled up to his home.

  “I’m looking for the family of Alexander Arredondo,” one of the Marines said as he approached the front door.28

  “I am the family,” Carlos replied, his voice trembling.

  The Marines then gave Carlos the news no parent should ever hear. The distraught father responded by running into his back yard and sitting motionless on the grass for several minutes. He called his other son, Brian, and then phoned his wife, Melida. Carlos was both surprised and angry that the Marines had not yet left his property and were still milling about on his front lawn. At that very moment, he snapped. He told the Marines to leave, then grabbed a hammer and began smashing the windows of their van. Carlos then grabbed a propane torch and a can of gasoline.

  “Sir, don’t do that,” one of the Marines pleaded.

  Carlos paid no attention. He climbed in the van, smashed more windows and then doused his body with gasoline and ignited the torch.

  “I just feel the explosion,” he said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2005. “It threw me out of the van and immediately I feel the flames all over me. I feel the sensation of burning. The sensation I was on fire.”29

  At that moment, a Marine grabbed Carlos by the pants and pulled him out of the burning van. A TV crew had arrived at the scene minutes earlier to capture video of the vehicle ablaze and Carlos’s twitching body being taken away by stretcher. His son Brian watched the drama on television from his mother’s home in Bangor. Carlos spent weeks in a hospital burn unit, racking up more than fifty thousand dollars in medical bills. But his personal torture was not yet over. In December 2011, Carlos’s only surviving son, Brian, took his own life. The twenty-four-year-old had been battling depression since Alexander’s death in 2004. The tragic news rocked Carlos and his wife, Melida — but instead of inflicting more pain on himself, Carlos immersed himself in the peace movement. He and Melida traveled the country, protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and calling attention to the plight of families trying to cope with the loss of loved ones struck down — both on the battlefield and beyond.

  Both Carlos and John Mixon were across the street from Marathon Sports when the first explosion occurred. The power of the blast knocked Mixon, a ruggedly built Vietnam vet, right out of the grandstand bleachers. The two friends immediately ran toward the smoke, and Mixon began tearing apart the barricades with his hands. Carlos leapt over the barricade and landed on his feet in a pile of burning limbs. He attended to two women who were bleeding and screaming on the ground. One victim was covered in heavy debris. Carlos lifted the rubble off of her, which allowed her to breathe. He then turned his attention back to the barricade, helping to pull it down so that other first responders could reach the victims. Carlos and Mixon noticed a man lying on the ground with both legs in makeshift tourniquets. It was Jeff Bauman. Bauman was being cared for by Dr. Allan Panter, a fifty-seven-year-old emergency room director from Gainesville, Georgia, who had traveled to Boston to watch his wife, Theresa, run the race. Panter had just worked on Krystle Campbell. The doctor had advised another first responder on the proper way to check her pulse — which was there, but faint.

  “I reached down and swung her back around so that her head was at my feet,” Panter recalls.30 “I gave her a couple mouth to mouth breaths, started screaming for an ambu bag, because I’m more in ER mode — I want tools to work with. And that’s when the Boston volunteers started pouring in.”

  Someone handed Panter an ambu bag, which acts as a manual resuscitator, and he continued his attempt to save Campbell’s life. He and others got the woman on a stretcher and rushed her to the nearby medical tent. She died on arrival.

  Panter returned to the scene and worked feverishly on Jeff Bauman, whose legs bad been blown off in the blast.

  “Help me, help me,” Bauman moaned.

  Jeff looked down at his body and saw that he was covered in blood and that his legs were missing. Panter applied his makeshift tourniquets with precision. Carlos Arredondo appeared at Panter’s side, and together they lifted Bauman into a wheelchair. Carlos and two mara
thon volunteers ran Bauman and the wheelchair away from the scene. Associated Press photographer Charles Krupa captured that moment in a photograph that became the most iconic image from that tragic day, for two reasons. The catastrophic injuries to Bauman’s legs — his right leg has been blown off at the knee, and his left is a distortion of raw, burning flesh and charred bone — reveal the gruesome horror of the attack. And Arredondo — who is wearing his customary cowboy hat as he rushes Bauman to safety — exemplifies the selfless heroism demonstrated by ordinary citizens on that calamitous April afternoon.

  Once Bauman arrived at the ambulance, Carlos tried to climb inside. He did not want to leave the young man’s side. The EMTs had to push him out of the vehicle.

  “You can’t be in here,” one EMT yelled.

  In Jeff Bauman, Carlos saw his two deceased sons. He could not be there to help his boys in their times of need, but he would do everything he could now for the young bombing victim.

  “Where, where you take this man?” Carlos asked.

  “BMC, Boston Medical Center,” the EMT told him as they closed the ambulance door.

  Once most of the injured people had been evacuated from the area, Carlos’s friend John Mixon began thinking about his daughter, a student at nearby Emerson College. He reached her apartment and was relieved to find that she was safe. John then changed his shirt, which had been covered in the blood of so many victims, and got cleaned up. Refreshed but still shaken by what he’d seen, Mixon was in for another shock. The FBI was calling his cell phone. They were looking for his friend, Carlos Arredondo.

  [12]

  TAKING COMMAND

  Just as the explosions were being reported over radios and scanners at the police and fire departments, word spread of another emergency. The John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester was on fire. The presidential library, a popular tourist spot right along Boston Harbor, was open that day, but there were no reports of injuries. The sky above the library was shrouded in thick, black smoke. Fire engines raced to the scene. Word of the fire only heightened the citywide panic and fueled the notion that Boston was under attack at multiple locations. The library was evacuated, but the smoke cleared quickly. Firefighters then walked onto the roof of one side of the library, where a large opening was covered in black soot from an explosion or fire. There was little information available at first, and there were conflicting reports as to whether the fire was related to the bombings.