Family, Friends Wait For Word From Local Runners At Boston Marathon
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Family and friends Monday frantically awaited word of loved ones who ran in the Boston Marathon, where two bombs went off near the finish line.
Two "incredibly powerful explosions just seconds apart" rocked the marathon right around 2:50 p.m. EST outside Marathon Sports on Boylston Street. Three people were killed, including an 8-year-old boy, and dozens more injured.
A runner from Pasadena, identified only as Caroline, was at the 25-mile mark when the bombs went off near where her parents were waiting for her at the finish line.
"It is devastating. First for somebody to do this, I do not understand the type of person," Caroline said.
Caroline and her parents were reunited at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"It was frightening," Caroline's mother, who was not identified, said. "We were inside. My daughter was outside with her husband and a baby. We all panicked. Of course, worried about Caroline, so it was frightening."
Pam Kershaw said her daughter Courtney, 27, of Agoura Hills was running for a charity at the marathon for the first time.
She said she felt helpless as the chaos unfolded on the streets of Boston.
"When I couldn't get a hold of her, when the phone wouldn't go through, I just started panicking more by the minute. I was just…sick to my stomach. Shaking like a leaf," said Kershaw.
For more than an hour, the mother said she had no idea if her eldest child was alive.
"Of course the scariest thing for me was knowing the time that she runs this race in and realizing that the time that these explosions went off was within a two to three minute period," Kershaw said.
Kershaw said her tears turned to relief when she finally got the call from the daughter that she was fine.
"As soon as I heard her voice, I felt like the weight had been lifted off my shoulders," she said.
Several marathoners from Southern California running clubs had traveled to the East Coast for the annual event. A manager from A Runner's Circle in Los Feliz said it was frightening when they initially could not get in touch with some of their club members.
"So we immediately checked, um, we couldn't get in touch them," Robin Sargon said. "We tried via Facebook as well, Facebook's awesome at that. So we got in touch with them via there, and we finally got to call them."
An editor from "The Price is Right" said her running club, the LA Leggers, also had 10 members running in Boston Monday. They were working to get in touch with everyone to make sure they are okay.
