When he arrived at the second blast site, he saw "a girl with no legs," he says. "Those are bombs!" he shouted at his partner, and jumped in the truck.
SUSPICIOUS PACKAGE IN BOSTON CRACK
That's new." But when the BPD bomb squad veteran felt the second crack deep in his chest, heard it echo down the Boylston Street channel, he knew, just knew, what it was. When he heard the first boom, Mitch McCormick thought, "They must have shot off a celebratory cannon. Then he saw it - twisted metal and a battery that were clearly out of place. We worked bombs the right way, or we didn't work them at all. As a military officer, fighting a war overseas, I was trained that no bomb was worth my life or the lives of the men and women under me. In an average operation, a team of bomb techs will spend an hour or two disassembling a single device-and that's if it proves to be a hoax. But I have never experienced anything like what the Boston bomb squad went through in April.īomb work is usually highly methodical. I've witnessed the worst that humans can do to each other. I deployed twice to Iraq, where I dismantled car bombs and investigated suicide attacks. I was an explosive-ordnance-disposal officer in the US Air Force, and I have been disarming bombs or training military and civilian squads for more than a decade. But that is exactly the situation Connolly and his fellow bomb squad colleagues faced in Boston. A so-called hand entry-that Hollywood-style search for the red wire-is almost never done, unless there is no other way to quickly save a life. Bomb squads are loaded with sophisticated equipment, and techs normally inspect suspicious packages with a robot, an x-ray machine, or a remotely detonated explosive tool. Ripping open potential explosive devices with a knife is not standard procedure. With no other options, he pulled out his knife, grabbed a bag, and cut into it. To initiate another device? How many more bombs were there? Was this going to be another Madrid? Mumbai?Ĭonnolly surveyed the scene for lone packages and backpacks-anything that could hide another similar device. Several people were trying furiously to make calls on their cell phones. But still stout, maybe 10 pounds, and easy to hide. A bomb? Two? Smaller than a car bomb, for sure. People were sprawled everywhere on the pavement, some with limbs at impossible angles. But slowly a cloud of smoke began to rise above the rooflines.Ĭonnolly pushed his way through the dazed crowd, running toward the finish line. The Boston Public Library and a mass of exhausted runners blocked his view. By the time his brain registered what it was, he felt another. Connolly didn't see the first explosion he felt it. Even at this early hour, revelers were starting to gather, most ignoring the techs methodically working their way around bars and restaurants and postrace recovery areas. Later that morning half a million spectators would watch nearly 25,000 athletes run the Boston Marathon, and security experts have considered major sporting events to be potential terrorist targets since the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. In the post-9/11 world, this was standard operating procedure, a precaution practiced by civilian bomb squads around the country. There Connolly and his teammates peered inside trash cans, peeked into car and store windows, and inspected flower planters.
It started after dawn at the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth in the city's tony Back Bay neighborhood. On the morning of April 15, 2013, Chris Connolly, a sergeant with the Boston police bomb squad, completed a ritual he had performed annually for the past eight years. The worst day in the life of the Boston Bomb Squad. A sea of backpacks to be searched by hand.
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