A Putnam County woman found herself alone on the streets of Boston during the Boston Marathon bombings.
Kara Boehm and her husband Richard returned to their home in Scott Depot Thursday after experiencing several scary hours Monday following the attack.
Richard was running in the marathon and was about a half-mile from finishing when the bombs went off. Kara was standing near the finish line just across the street from where the bombings occurred. She says it didn’t take long to realize something terrible had happened.
“My gut instinct was that it was something that was definitely not normal, something to be afraid of,” Boehm told MetroNews. “It felt about 15 seconds had passed and the second one went off. It’s then you knew something was wrong and fear set in.”
Boehm was alone and she asked a man next to her what they should do and his advice was to stay there, at least for a while.
“The biggest fear in that was just worrying the next explosion was going to happen right behind where you were standing. And if you were to walk would you walk into the next one that was coming?”
Boehm ended up walking. She only had 10 percent battery life left on her iphone. She managed to text some friends who suggested she find a hotel lobby but instead she found a quiet park somewhere in Boston.
“I just walked. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know anything about where we were,” she said. “I just walked until I found a courtyard with some trees and small walls. It wasn’t near buildings or a lot of people,” she said.
She then heard from her husband through a text message. He had borrowed a phone from another runner. They arranged a meeting place and it took her another 20 minutes to get there on foot.
Boehm says she’s thought a lot about the bombings since Monday. She says she’s not sure they could have been prevented.
“They take all of the security measures they can but at a marathon everybody’s on foot, everybody’s got a bag,” she said. “There’s no security clearance. You just walk in and stand where you want to stand.”