Detroit — Pat Spence, a member of St. Daniel Parish in Clarkston, figured she had an excellent grandstand seat from which she could see her husband, Don, cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon April 15.
Instead, she found herself directly across Boylston Street from where the first bomb exploded as two Chechen immigrant brothers with radical Islamic ties allegedly wreaked death and injury on participants in this year’s event.
The bomb went off at 2:50 p.m. “I was startled, shocked, but I didn’t scream,” she said of her initial reaction.
As close as she was, she still did not realize just what had happened. She heard screams coming from the finish line area, but thought the bomb must have been inside the building, and that people were probably just injured from broken glass.
“What I could see was the huge cloud of smoke,” Spence said.
But then, “Fifteen or 20 seconds later, the second one exploded about 50 yards down the street,” she recounted.
That’s when she realized it was a direct attack on the marathon, and she became worried for her husband’s safety. She began leaving the grandstand with the thought of heading back along the course of the marathon to find Don, but soon encountered a barrier.
“When I tried to move it, a cop stopped me. I told him I had to find my husband, but he said, ‘No, lady, there might be more bombs,’” she said.
Spence started to argue, but then a college-aged young man “put his arm around me and said, ‘Come on, I’m going to get you out of here.’”
“He led me up the street, across the street and away from Boylston. I was crying the whole time, and telling him I had to find my husband.”
She sent a text message to Don, asking him where he was, but the text service — while not shut down like voice cellphone service — was running very slow, and she did not receive any reply at that time.
The college student, who identified himself only as Austin, assured her everything would be all right and otherwise tried to comfort her, as she again tried texting her husband.
When she finally did get a reply message, it was only two words — “Still running” — suggesting that he hadn’t realized what had happened when he received her first message.
With text message service within Boston eventually shut down as well, it was only by messages being relayed by their daughter, Erin, a Michigan State University student in East Lansing, that Don Spence was able to tell her to go to the Marriott Hotel, where all the participants running to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation were to gather after the race.
Pat Spence’s adventure was not yet over, however, as when she and Austin got near the Marriott, police would not even let them cross the street to get to it.
When they finally found a way to sneak around to the hotel from another direction, they encountered security guards who would not let them in. But with some more ingenuity, they eventually found an unguarded loading dock and entered the building, and made their way up a back stairwell to the hospitality suite floor.
When they entered the hospitality suite, and Pat and Don had a tearful reunion. It turned out police had formed a barrier to keep runners from getting near the bombing sites, so her husband had already been in the suite for some time.
Austin soon left, without Pat Spence finding out anything more about him. “He might be a member of the fraternity of angels, as far as I’m concerned,” she said.
Both Don and Pat Spence came away from their experience impressed by how many people rushed to aid the victims of the bombing, without knowing whether there might be more set to go off.
“There’s a lot of evil out there, but there is so much good,” she said.
A priest friend of theirs also took part in the Boston Marathon, but with a time of 3 hours, 17 minutes, Fr. Daniel Pajerski, LC, was well across the finish line before the first bomb went off.
“I was sitting in a restaurant maybe seven or eight blocks away, with my sister when the bombings took place,” recounted Fr. Pajerski, chaplain to the boys school at Everest Collegiate High School in Clarkston.
“In fact, I didn’t even learn of it until my brother-in-law called while I was on my way back to my hotel,” he added.
Reflecting on the bombings, Fr. Pajerski said the terrorist attack was “terrible, tragic and senseless.” But he added how impressed he was by “the generosity of the people who rushed to help those who were hurt.”
“There are people who abuse their freedom, but there are also people who generously use their freedom to help others — and I think they are in the majority,” Fr. Pajerski said.
