Holly Dickson
hollydickson.md@gmail.com
Aerospace engineering freshman Noah Falck didn’t hear the bombs explode at the Boston Marathon finish line. He had finished the race almost an hour and a half earlier and was resting in a massage area for runners — a safe distance from the destruction wreaked by the bombing. But when another runner told him there had been two explosions, Falck worked his way back to the finish line area to help however he could.
The Boston Harold named him a “finish line hero,” but he denied that his actions were anything out of the ordinary.
“The real heroes were the first responders,” Falck said. “The police and fire department that went in there, and the doctors who saved hundreds of lives. I was just doing what everyone else was doing.”
Falck, who finished the marathon in 3 hours, 1 minute, spent six hours in the area after the bombs went off, emptying buses full of gear from 27,000 runners, he said. The blocks immediately surrounding the explosions were cordoned off, but Falck talked with people who had witnessed the bombing’s chaos and destruction, helped runners find their bags and guided people out of the area.
The wind whipped up after the bombs went off, Falck said, chilling the sweaty runners who were already wearing next to nothing in the 49 degree weather and furthering the need to connect the bags full of clothes to their owners.
Since the marathon course began in Hopkinton, Mass., runners loaded their bags of essential items they’d need after the race onto buses so they could pick them up again at the finish on Boylston Street in downtown Boston. Many runners who hadn’t yet finished the race or picked up their bags were without money, clothes or their cell phone.
Falck had been unloading buses so they could be moved out of the race area for 30 minutes when he heard a third explosion just a block and a half away, a purposeful detonation by bomb squads, he said. The Boston Globe confirmed bomb squads controlled the third explosion, heard around the city at 4 p.m.
But through the confusion and fear on the streets, Falck said the compassion of Bostonians was evident.
“People were opening their doors and handing out food and water,” he said. “It didn’t matter who you were, they were helping out.”
He saw runners with nothing on but shorts or a thin running shirt taken into locals’ houses to warm up. The kindness that emanated from Bostonians was “one great thing” that came of the otherwise tragic event, Falck said.
Falck, a ROTC member at Cal Poly, said he would have returned to help people either way, but the values of honor, duty and selfless service he has learned from the Army “reinforced” his decision.
“There were people running away, but there were hundreds of people running toward it,” he said. “I would have done it either way.”
‘An incident at the finish line’
Another member of Cal Poly’s community, mechanical engineering professor Patrick Lemieux, also ran the Boston Marathon.
Lemieux met Falck by chance, after finishing the race and before the bombs went off in a medical building full of chiropractors and masseuses a block down and over from the finish line.
“He was coming out as I was coming in,” Lemieux said. “He was wearing a Cal Poly jersey and I shook his hand and said, ‘Hey, Cal Poly.’”
Lemieux, who has run in five marathons including Boston, said the atmosphere during the race was “dynamic and electrifying.”
“Once you get closer to the finish line, the whole threshold of noise keeps increasing, increasing and increasing,” he said. “You can really tell when you get into Boston.”
Lemieux finished the race in 3 hours, 17 minutes, approximately an hour before the first explosion. After passing under the finish line banner, he was given Gatorade, water, a space blanket and a medal, before he picked up his bag of belongings and headed for the same building Falck was in.
But just 30 minutes later, the building was evacuated — race officials said there had “been an incident at the finish line.”
At first Lemieux presumed a runner had a heart attack at the finish line, but the scene on the street convinced him otherwise.
“Once you got out onto the street, it was just like 9/11,” he said. “They’ve got EMTs and police and ambulances just screeching down the street.”
Eventually, Lemieux said he heard a rumor that bombs had gone off and he began to try to find his way to his hotel, but if he’d seen a way he could’ve helped people, he would have, he said.
“I didn’t see anything,” he said. “I did not see smoke, didn’t see broken glass, all the pictures of blood that you saw on the news after, all that was so far from where you could stand by the time I got out of the building that I didn’t see any of that.”
In addition, the cell network was completely overwhelmed, buses, taxis and the subways shut down immediately, he said.
While it hadn’t taken him much more than three hours to run 26.2 miles earlier in the day, it took another three hours and two or three dozen phone calls to his hotel’s shuttle before he was able to connect with it to make it to his hotel.
“I was in kind of bad shape,” Lemieux said. “I was stiff after the marathon and so on, and I was freezing.”
Split-second decisions
While Falck and Lemieux were in the midst of the action, Cal Poly graduate student Annie Aguiniga was back home, watching the events in Boston unfold in horror.
She was supposed to go to the race, but dropped out a few weeks before because full-time work and school hadn’t allowed enough time for training, she said.
“I thought about it and decided it wasn’t the year to go,” she said.
So instead of running in Boston on April 15, Aguiniga was sitting at work, admittedly bummed she wasn’t in the race, when she got a news update from The New York Times on her phone.
“My stomach just dropped,” she said.
Her phone began ringing repeatedly with calls from worried friends and family who still thought she was running in Boston.
“I’m sad I didn’t run the race,” she said. “But I really feel that split-second decision saved me and my family’s life.”
Aguiniga said, however, that the bombing wouldn’t scare her away from this “mecca” of running events in future years.
“If anything,” she said, “I think it would give me more of an inspiration to want to run it in honor of what happened.”