When Melissa McGrath applied to run in the Boston Marathon for charity a year ago, she had concerns.
The Ball State assistant professor of speech language pathology was worried that she would not raise her $5,000 goal for The Melanoma Foundation of New England Inc., and becauseh she was a mom of three and hadn’t run a full marathon in 15 years.
McGrath was not worried that two bombs would detonate, killing three and injuring hundreds, preventing her from finishing the race and sending the city into chaos.
But that is exactly what happened as she crossed the 23-mile mark, three miles from the finish.
Her husband, Kevin McGrath, called her while she was running to warn her that a bomb had gone off. He was on the train one mile away from the finish line, headed toward it in order to cheer her on as she crossed.
“We had just seen [Melissa] at mile 17 and a person I know, one of their family members, texted us and said, ‘Bomb, don’t come,’” her husband said. “We were on our way to the finish line to see them finish. One of the women that I was traveling around with, [about] 10... seconds later, after the second bomb went off, she got a text that said, ‘Bomb, bomb.’”
He and his friends were lucky enough to get off the overcrowded train and called Melissa, who he immediately searched for.
“I walked up to a policeman and said, ‘Which direction do I start walking?’” he said. “And he just laughed and said, ‘Well where do you want to go?’ And I thought it was weird, there’s bombs going off and he’s smiling. For a second I was thinking... maybe this is a hoax and then all of a sudden the radio... on his shoulder started going crazy and he pushed me aside and started calling on the radio. So we actually knew probably 15 seconds before the police even did, I think.”
He was able to flag Melissa down at mile 25, but she was delirious after running for four hours and took off to finish the race. He knew that the police would be stopping runners before the finish, and that she would be stuck in the crowd.
“That’s was when it got really scary for me because I knew she was safe, because I knew I had just seen her and I knew the bombs had just gone off, [but] I didn’t know if there were more bombs,” Kevin said. “The scary part was that you didn’t have cellphone service [and] she was in a city that she has never been in before.”
He said it took an hour and 40 minutes to make any contact with Melissa because in the few seconds when the phones were up after towers were shut down, he was receiving too many calls and texts for him to successfully call Melissa. Kevin said he got about 75 texts, 75 emails and 10 voicemails.
“That was a really long hour and 45 minutes, just not knowing how we would find each other,” he said. “What’s scary is on the news you see what is going on at the finish line, but you don’t realize that there is more than a million people around the city that are in this mass chaos. There’s police and military and helicopters and ambulances and fire trucks flying all over the city and everyone is just in a panic, running from bomb scares. The whole city is under siege and going nuts.”
After about four hours Kevin finally met up with Melissa near Fenway Park.
Since they were staying in a hotel within a mile of the finish line, Melissa said she and Kevin walked about three miles around all the barricaded blocks to get there. Their car was stuck in the parking garage.
“At this point, the whole city was kind of being shut down,” Melissa said. “We didn’t know if there were other bombs planted in other places. [We] went through security to walk through alleyways by our hotel.”
The McGraths were planning to stay in the city until Wednesday. What was supposed to be a mini-vacation including sight-seeing and celebrating turned into walking through a ghost town.
“It was very strange,” Melissa said. “I obviously wasn’t in New York for 9/11 but I feel like it was probably very similar to what that was. Our hotel was right across the street... less than a mile from the finish line... so continuously outside of our hotel and outside of this hospital there were full armored vehicles and SWAT men with the full guard on walking around with machine guns and a continuous police presence. “
Kevin and Melissa said Bostonians acted as normal as they could despite the situation.
“Before they had caught the suspects or anything the whole city was rallying around the runners and rallying around the fact that we would come back, better and stronger,” Melissa said.
The McGraths flew back to Fishers, Ind., two days after the race.
Melissa said despite her mother’s attempts to hide the news from their kids, they ended up hearing about the bombs and realized that was where their parents were.
“I have an 11-year-old who told me never to run a marathon again, and then my 4-year-old told me that he was just really happy I was a slow runner because if I had been going faster I would have been hit by a big explosion,” Melissa said. “I think as a parent it is very difficult to explain to your children that there are people out there that do this, even though those were only two people of the tens of thousands of people who were in Boston that day yelling and supporting and cheering us.”
Kevin said he doesn’t want the bombings to affect him or his family moving forward.
“It was scary in the moment but you can’t live like that,” Kevin said. “Just a couple of crazy people with an awful agenda, it’s going to happen. But I’ll tell you when you are in the moment, it is very scary.”
Melissa said that she also thought it was important to talk about her experience with her classes, since she assumed the rumors would have spread to her students by the time she got back.
“I think that we are still in the chaos of it all,” Melissa said. “I think that our heads are still spinning, I don’t think that it has hit us that it has been a week and that we are home and that we are safe. We’re thankful that we made it. We are just mourning and tearful for all of the people who didn’t because there are just so many victims. It certainly gives me more appreciation for how life can change in just a second.”
