“We Interrupt This Blog…” (04-19-13)

  The last few days have been difficult for a lot of people and devastating for others.  On Monday April 15, two bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.  Most people know that I grew up in a suburb of Boston, where Patriot’s Day is an extremely important holiday, and the marathon is considered to be one of the first signs of spring.  It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that the whole country didn’t celebrate Patriot’s Day as a holiday!

Like many people, I’ve been following the news, watching the search for the culprits, listening to reports about the victims, and waiting for new details on an hourly basis.  I guess our lack of privacy in this modern world actually helped lead to a resolution of the situation. The subjects were videotaped, showed up on multiple surveillance cameras, and police asked for any and all witness’s digital pictures that might show something of value.  Within a day or so, we knew what these two guys-brothers- looked like.

Throughout this ordeal, my Facebook page has been littered with “Boston Strong” pictures and messages of solidarity.  The New York baseball fans sang the Fenway theme song “Sweet Caroline” at the Yankees game. 

At the Boston Bruins game, when Rene Rancourt started singing his usual rendition of our National Anthem, the sound of his voice was drowned out by the singing from the Boston fans. He shut off his microphone and turned it over to the crowd.  An amazing moment.










Last night, after a police chase and firefight, one of the two suspects was killed, and the second on was on the run.  He ran to the town of Watertown, a town I know very well.  I have had friends from there, my brother used to live there, and I have shopped many times at the Arsenal Mall, which was on the edge of the 20 block police perimeter.

empty streets of Boston

It is amazing to me that Massachusetts police and FBI were so committed to catching this guy that they essentially shut down the city of Boston and many of its suburbs, to cut off his escape routes. No school in session, no busses running, no mass transit, no trains, and no taxis were on duty.  Businesses were asked to stay closed and citizens were asked to stay in their homes and lock the doors.  Absolutely unprecedented. My son lives in one of the towns that was in “lock down” mode.

So today, even if I had wanted to go out and explore, I felt glued to the TV as the more than 9000 police officers held a perimeter while conducting a house by house search.  In fact, I installed a police scanner app on my ipad so I could listen to what was happening, as it was happening, even before the media reported on it.  I am exhausted, and I wasn’t even there! I had the scanner on one Apple product, and the map on the other, so I could track the movements of the police. 

Early this evening, after completing the 20 block search and finding no one, the police were getting ready to close that particular operation when they received a call from a local resident who noticed blood on the tarp covering the boat in his back yard. Soon after confirming that he was indeed hiding in the boat, “suspect #2” was apprehended.  And now, like everyone else, I get to relax and breathe a sigh of relief.