Susan Hagel of Norfolk was running slower than normal at the Boston Marathon Monday. She stopped at mile 25 to talk to a friend, had she not, she would have been going through the finishing area as the explosion was happening.
"Blessed really is the right word," Hagel said. "I just consider myself so lucky that I did and stopped and talked to my friend cause if I hadn't they wouldn't had those barricades up and I would have made it through and either I would have finished close to when the time that everything was happening or I would have been finishing after it happened and i could only imagine the chaos of going down there."
Liam Grieser of Virginia Beach, had just finished the race when he and his sister heard the first bomb go off behind them.
"We immediately looked up and saw the cloud of smoke came up and maybe I don't know five seconds later another explosion occurred down the road, now we actually saw that one go," Grieser said.
Regina Davis cheered on her son, Michael. She was in the crowd near where the bomb went off. "We saw glass and debris and rocks flying from maybe a second-story window, it wasn't the tall building," Davis said. "And so people were not panicking. They were just kind of amazed and looking at each other. Less than a minute later, a few buildings down that same block, another bomb went off. And that`s when people started moving quickly."
People rushed in to help, as the rest of the large crowd tried to run away, the heavy legs of runners that had already carried them for 26.2 miles, needed to take them to safety.
"People are walking in the door crying because it was so scary," Davis said. "And it was horrible. How dare someone do something like that to a race. This is a family event."
