For many in Brookline, the connection to the Boston Marathon runs deep.
When runners hit Beacon Street, they know the finish line isn’t far. Crowds of spectators flock to the sidelines, hundreds of volunteers direct traffic and support race operations, while healthcare providers and law enforcement officers stand ready for what the day may bring.
Ten years ago, on April 15, 2013, two bombs went off near the finish line in Boston. As first responders flooded the scene, thousands of runners were halted at the Brookline town line. Three people died from the explosions, and more than 260 were injured.
Brookline was among the communities locked down as law enforcement searched for the terrorists, who killed an MIT police officer before the manhunt ended in Watertown with one terrorist dead and the other, his brother, gravely injured.
To mark the anniversary, Brookline.News collected stories and memories from those who were running, watching and working that day. To share your memories, email us at xxxxxx.
Text by Sam Mintz. Photo by xxxx
The Hospital Media Contact
Jerry Berger
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was awash with reporters, and it was Jerry Berger’s job to deal with them.
Berger, 71, was director of media relations at Beth Israel, which treated two dozen victims of the bombing and both brothers responsible for the attack.
Over the week following the bombing, the communications team’s pager received more than 1,000 messages, and Berger juggled a complicated set of dynamics. Some patients wanted privacy, and others wanted to be heard.
One mother, who had one badly injured son at Beth Israel and another at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wanted to speak to the media. Berger, a long-time Brookline resident, recalls a hasty meeting with Brigham’s vice president of communications on a Beth Israel loading dock to work out the logistics of honoring her request.
Tensions ramped up when the two Tsarnaev brothers, one deceased and the other badly injured, were brought to Beth Israel a few days later. Berger, in what would become a 24-hour day, had been called back to work that night as the manhunt was taking place,
Early the next morning, with scores of journalists camped out across the street in Joslin Park, Beth Israel held its first news conference in 12 years.
“You don’t hold pressers at 5 in the morning, but it was very well-attended,” Berger said.
As the terrorist was held and treated at the hospital, the building quickly swarmed with law enforcement officers from the FBI and U.S. Marshal’s Service, many fully armed in tactical gear.
Amid several privacy breaches – published photos of both brothers taken in the hospital, and a CNN reporter who managed to get on to a patient floor – information was quickly locked down.
“I was only told Tsarnaev had left the building after he had left the building,” Berger said. “They snuck him out in a hearse through the morgue.”
A week and a half after the bombing, Berger, who now works as a communications consultant and lectures at Boston University, took his first full day off.
‘We were on for 10 straight days,” he said. “And that wears at you. There was all this pain and suffering and that’s just going to get to you.”
Text by Sam Mintz.
The Town Administrator
Mel Kleckner
The trash cans stick out in Mel Kleckner’s memory.
He was Brookline town administrator in 2013, tasked with overseeing safety and logistics along the town’s portion of the Marathon route.
As reports of a bombing at the finish line started to trickle in, he and his team picked up a piece of information that they decided warranted action.
“We were trying to secure all the trash barrels, all along Beacon Street, because there was some suggestion that maybe the bombs were put in a trash receptacle,” Kleckner said.
That was one of many tidbits during the disconcerting day that turned out to be false.
“It was the beginning of how to deal with this massive amount of information that comes up,” Kleckner said. “Now we think we know a little more about not jumping to conclusions, and looking at the sources of these types of things. But at the time, all of them were being taken seriously.”
Although the bombs exploded a few miles east, the impact on Brookline was immediate. Thousands of runners were stopped at the Brookline town line, right before Audubon Circle, little over a mile away from the finish line. Some were angry and confused; they’d been training for this moment for months or years.
Kleckner’s mind immediately went to his deputy Melissa Goff, who had taken VIP tickets allocated to the town.
“The first thing I thought about was her, and whether she was sitting at the finish line,” Kleckner said. “It’s hard to separate the personal from the professional.”
Goff, it turned out, was not at the finish line, and Kleckner’s three teenage sons watching the race were also away from danger.
Kleckner, 65, who retired as town administrator in 2021, said that the Marathon bombing shifted the way he and other leaders thought about big events, including the U.S Open golf tournament that took place in Brookline last year.
“Everything changed after that day, I felt, in terms of preparedness and intelligence,” he said. “Any big event after that was a much more collaborative effort between the federal, state and local government.”
Text by Sam Mintz.
The Runners
Sidhu Gangadharan/Sarah Harris
Sidhu Gangadharan crossed the Marathon finish line 10 minutes before the bombing. Sarah Harris was stopped less than a mile from the finish, at an overpass that now reads “Boston Strong.” It was a first marathon for both.
They were among 30 runners competing that day in the inaugural year of Team Brookline, a town-sponsored group raising money for local non-profit organizations.
From a cheering station at mile 23, TB program director Nancy Vineberg was enjoying a beautiful day when reports came in of explosions at the finish line. “I remember thinking how are we ever going to do the Boston Marathon again?” she said. “My second thought was: Where are
our runners?”
It took six hours to account for all the runners. Some suffered minor injuries or were knocked down, but none were seriously hurt.
Gangadharan, ___AGE___, a surgeon who lives in Brookline, remembers walking around near the finish line in a daze, foggy from exhaustion and trying to understand what was happening. Once he took a shower, Gangadharan’s first instinct was to head to the hospital to help, but his
post-marathon body wouldn’t cooperate. “I couldn’t move,” he said. “I was in no shape to get back.”
A few days later, Gangdharan reran the last three miles of the Marathon course. “There was a lot of emotion wrapped in it,” he said. “It felt cathartic to run down the race route again, knowing how much tragedy was involved.”
Meanwhile, Harris, ___AGE___, a teacher in the Brookline public schools who lives in Wellesley, had grabbed a mylar blanket to warm herself as she tried to find a ride home from the Marathon. Whatever disappointment she felt about not finishing the race yielded to relief. “We were lucky not to have seen anything, not to have been hurt,” she said. “Very lucky.”
A year later, Harris ran the race, in part to show her students she wasn’t afraid.
“There’s so much trust we have to have in our community as we go about our daily lives. And that was a moment where that trust was violated,” she said. “But you can’t live in fear. So there we were, in 2014, back at it again.”
Text by Sam Mintz. Photos by Edward Boches