Mystic Woman Recalls Explosions At Boston Marathon

There was a moment, maybe seven minutes after the first explosion at the Boston Marathon, where Lara Schrage of Mystic, stopped and looked around.

She was shaking from the cold, standing by buses for marathon runners waiting to get their clothes. Hundreds of people, some crying and screaming, were suddenly running toward her. 

She felt like it wasn't real, like she was in a movie.

“It turned into mass hysteria,” she said of the moments after the blast. “And I got scared that the crowds of people that were freaking out would get trampled or pushed down and get inured, because it was just hysteria. Everybody was just running and screaming and frantic.”

Schrage, 28, crossed the finish line at 2:38 p.m., less than 20 minutes before the first explosion. She was 100 feet away.

The first explosion

Schrage ran the Marathon with two friends; Karina Montoya and Julia Cooper, both of Mystic. Cooper stopped to walk and stretch during the race, and fell behind her friends.

Schrage and Montoya finished together. Montoya was so exhausted and sore she couldn’t walk, so she sat on the sidewalk. Schrage left to get her a blanket, brought it back, and a medic tried to help Montoya get up and walk.

“I could hardly walk,” Schrage said. “My legs were in so much pain, I couldn’t even bend my knee. After you run a marathon, you just kind of want to collapse,” she said.

Then they heard the blast.

“It’s like one of those things like in a parade, where the cannon goes off and it shakes you on the inside,” Schrage said.

Montoya, who could hardly walk, suddenly took off running, and Schrage screamed her name and grabbed her arm so they wouldn’t lose each other.

The second explosion

“When we were running, we heard the second explosion. The second one wasn’t as dramatic. We didn’t feel it, but it was like a block down the road,” she said.

They ran to where buses had lined up with runners’ bags of warm clothes. It was mobbed. The volunteers who normally would have handed out blankets and medals had rushed toward the smoke.

Schrage heard someone say maybe the sound system exploded. Others said “bomb,” but she couldn’t think that, she said. So she waited, shivering, in line for their warm clothes.

Everyone was on their phones trying to make calls. Then the crowd of hundreds of people started running toward them.

“Some people were crying, some people were screaming, everyone just looked panicked and frantic and confused,” Schrage said. “We asked people, like a dozen people, why they were running and nobody knew.”

Fear of Trampling

Schrage said she was afraid she’d get trampled, so she and Montoya ducked between two buses and jumped over a barricade.

Then they were running, too. “We ran down the road and were just screaming, ‘Does anyone have a phone? Does anyone have a phone?'” she said.

Schrage’s husband, her mother, and Cooper’s husband were supposed to be at the finish line, but there were so many people they hadn’t seen them. They didn’t know where Cooper was.

A few people lent Schrage or Montoya phones, but no calls went through. Then they saw some runners get clothes from the backside of the buses, so they did the same. They decided to go to a meeting place on Stuart Street that they’d chosen with their families in advance.

Finding Family

“We heard lots of sirens the entire time, and when we got back onto the roads there were lots of police, and ambulances and sirens, and black SUVs, like unmarked cars coming through and police, directing traffic and trying to direct people,” she said.

But she said she made it to the meeting place and saw her husband. An hour had passed since the end of the race, but he’d waited.

Her voice shook recalling the moment she found him there.

“I was scared but I was trying to stay calm,” she said. “I didn’t want to set myself into a panic before I knew anything.”

She eventually learned that Cooper was also safe and with another runner from Groton, James Roy. The friends connected with Cooper’s husband. Then Schrage took a train home.

She wouldn’t have felt safe in the city, she said. She never would have slept. She got home at 9 p.m. and was so grateful to be there, she said.

“It just seems like this was a bad dream,” she said. “That this couldn’t have really happened.”