Late in the day on April 15, 2013, my wife and I met Alan Day and Lisa Contee as we made our way along a crowded Charles Street.
Hours earlier, we cheered Mike Napoli as he hit the double that sealed a win for the Red Sox on a cool, sun-drenched Fenway afternoon. Now, across the street on Boston Common, we could see State Police cruisers and SUVs parked on the lawn in long lines.
Leaving the ballpark and walking into Back Bay, I heard a loud bang that sounded like a big truck rolling over one of those steel road plates.
Another bang a few seconds later made me glance at the people walking in the same direction as us. Our eyes met, then looked away. A few faces wore worried looks.
Everything changed a block later. A wave of people poured across the Prudential Center plaza and onto Huntington Avenue.
“What happened?” we asked. “What’s going on?”
“Bombing. Explosion,” came back the answers as people rushed past us. Later, my wife said she told me, “We’ve got to get out of here” and to that I responded, “We need to see if we can help people.”
The crowd’s momentum backed us up against a railing and we watched as one police car, then a second, and then a convoy of vehicles — including ambulances and heavy-weight tactical response trucks — rolled to a stop on Huntington.
My wife and a woman traded rapid-fire questions as I began texting my editor. Then I looked across the street and spotted Stan Forman, the greatest journalist I know. The look in his eyes told me everything.
The woman’s husband joined her and told her in a halting voice why he left his belt on Boylston Street.
We started walking again, passing Back Bay station just as someone shouted in a loud voice and people scattered in every direction. We darted behind a stairwell past a woman whose face was frozen in terror, her eyes seeing nothing but the panic inside her.
Alan Day and Lisa Contee were still wearing their yellow-and-blue Boston Marathon volunteer bibs when we struck up a conversation with them on Charles Street. That’s when we learned Day was from Lynn.
They explained what they saw and heard near the finish line.
“We both jumped into crisis mode,” Day said. “People were coming toward us, terror on their faces — it was utter chaos.”
They helped steer spectators off Boylston Street, including hundreds of people who had never been to Boston before the 2013 marathon. They told us they were headed to the Orange Line on the way to an American Red Cross rendezvous point. We gave them a ride to Wellington station.
A few days later, I spoke to Day and found out that he and Contee spent the night of the bombings and the next morning parked on Boston Common.
They fed and provided beverages to the National Guard, who were dispatched to form a perimeter around the Back Bay neighborhood that had been turned into a crime scene.
For the next three days, Day and Contee provided food and other assistance to law enforcement agents and police officers scouring Boston’s Back Bay for bombing evidence in alleys, streets, and even rooftops.
They also set up a shelter for people who were evacuated from their homes, and provided aid to people converging on a “family reunification center” established at Boston’s World Trade Center.
They were also on hand with other Red Cross workers during the intensive police effort that started in Cambridge and later moved to Watertown.
We met Day and Contee again on Patriots Day 2014.
People in the crowd packed around the marathon finish line and held up “Boston runs as one” posters. The day was sunny and breezy — April at its finest. Police officers were everywhere, scanning the crowd even as they accepted “thank yous” from people.
I shouted at Day from the pre-arranged spot where we agreed to meet, and the four of us shared a few words.
Contee described the strong sense of pride she felt returning to Boston to work as a Marathon and Red Cross volunteer. She also described how she felt about the marathon bombers.
“This is America,” she said. “You have some nerve.”
