Scott Swanson And Sean C. Morgan
Amanda (Basham) Brown and her husband Alex were sitting in a Starbucks coffee shop in a mall not too far from the finish line at the Boston Marathon Monday morning when they got a phone call.
Brown, 23, of West Linn, had finished running the marathon a short time earlier and had met Alex at Starbucks where they were waiting for his parents, Dr. Rick and Judy Hindmarsh, to join them.
“Anybody who knows me would know where to find me,” Brown joked.
It was her second marathon, after qualifying for Boston, the oldest annual marathon in the world and one of the most famous, last year.
She went all out Monday– finishing in 3 hours 14 minutes and 18 seconds, good for 4,585th place overall (out of 23,336 runners who started) and 497th among the 9,983 women in the race.
“I just ran the hardest I could possibly run that race,” said Brown, who started distance running as a senior at Sweet Home High School in 2008 and went on to run at Pacific University. “I could hardly walk.”
The Browns and the Hindmarshes had agreed to meet at the coffee shop after the race, she said.
They had been there about 20 minutes when the phone call came, from Alex’s mother. An explosion had occurred, she said. They were two blocks from the finish line, where chaos was erupting.
“Judy said, ‘It has to be a bomb,” since she could smell gunpowder.
It was. Boston police responded to two large explosions, within about 10 seconds and 100 yards of each other near the finish line of the race, at about 2:50 p.m. eastern time on Monday.
The Associated Press reported Monday evening that three people were confirmed dead and more than 130 injured, many critically, by shrapnel from the bombs.
Boston Police Department reported responding to a third explosion in the area of the JFK Library in Dorchester. That incident may have been an incendiary device or a fire. The nature of the incident is under investigation.
A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the attack was being treated as an act of terrorism, according to the AP story. Two other unexploded bombs were found near the end of the 26.2 mile course.
Brown was one of two runners who grew up in Sweet Home had completed the 26.2-mile race prior to the bombing near the finish line Monday afternoon.
Corvallis resident Donald Gallogly, 45, son of longtime Slip ‘n’ Snip owners Donald and Alice Gallogly of Sweet Home, also participated.
“As soon as it happened, he (Donald Gallogly) called my other son here in Oregon and told him he was all right and in the shower when it happened,” said Alice Gallogly. “He did very well in the race. It’s just terrible something like that had to happen.”
Gallogly heard about the attack after returning from an aerobics class, she said. Her son had finished the marathon before she started her class at 10:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. in Boston.
His parents were relieved, Mrs. Gallogly said. “But I’ll be glad when he gets home.”
Near the finish line, hysteria mounted, Basham said Monday evening in a phone call to The New Era.
“It was nuts. It was so crazy. It was absolute chaos. People were shocked out of their minds when they’d seen what happened.
“As soon as everybody found out what happened, everybody started sprinting out, all together. At first we had to stop and think about what to do because we didn’t want to go with a giant group of people.”
Boston authorities had shut down public transit and their cellphones were not working, she said. They decided they had to walk to where they could find transporation to their lodging, “far out of town.”
“At that point, my mind was better than my body,” she said. “I was able to run. We ran away from people as fast as we could.”
She said she and Alex walked and ran for about two hours until they were able to find a bus to take them back to their motel.
Brown said she was relieved that her family came through without injury, particularly since, she said, her husband and father-in-law had considered stationing themselves right about where one of the bombs exploded so they could get a good shot of her coming down the marathon’s home stretch.
“They decided not to because the spot where they were going to be was where one of the charities was going to have a party,” she said.
The experience was somewhat surreal, like being in a movie, Brown said, adding that they met people after the blasts who had seen victims’ limbs blown off.
“Even the stories don’t explain it. You don’t even realize it was real. It was hard to take it all in.
“It’s such a bummer. That was, by far, the most amazing race I ever ran. There were five rows deep of people cheering and yelling for you. The runners were just there to have fun. They didn’t really care about their times. They were in the Boston Marathon.
“Then that happens. Something so positive turned to something so negative in just a split second.”