Humboldt State University Professor Tasha Souza was stopped in her tracks by crowds fleeing explosions after finishing the Boston Marathon yesterday — a race she attended to honor a lost friend.
Souza was unharmed, but the day was already a poignant one for her, because she’d been running in honor of her friend Suzanne Seemann, who was killed by a car while jogging with friends from the Six Rivers Running Club in September.
“I’m physically OK,” Souza said, calling from Los Angeles while waiting for a flight home. “I went into the race a bit emotional.”
After crossing the finish line, Souza said she was overcome with emotion while remembering her friend.
“My plan was to go back to the finish line and because I was so upset, I decided to go back out and stretch and calm myself down.”
Souza was two blocks away, walking back to the finish line from the Boston Common, when she heard the explosions.
“We thought ‘was that a cannon? Was that thunder?'” she said. “That’s when I was stopped in my tracks. I’m lucky I didn’t see the carnage. I just saw people horrified, running towards me.”
The bombing, which officials are calling a terror attack, killed three — including an 8-year-old boy — and injured more than 100 others.
Arcata attorney Chris Hamer was registered for the event but didn’t attend — she’s been under the weather lately and hotels were too expensive.
“This is the first time I have ever signed up for a marathon and not run it,” Hamer wrote in an email. “As it turns out, the explosions occurred about the time I probably would have been crossing the finishing line, if I had run the marathon.”
Safely in Arcata, Hamer experienced firsthand some of the concern and confusion that followed the bombing, as people around the country scrambled to find out if friends and family were harmed.
“Today’s Times-Standard lists my status as unknown,” she wrote. “I have now had 112 phone calls, texts, emails and Facebook messages asking if I am OK. I am sorry to cause so many people worry, but touched so many people cared.”
Other runners from Humboldt County also are apparently OK, according to reports in the Lost Coast Outpost and Times-Standard.
This article appears in Re-Imagining CR.
Another of my posts censored on Eric Kirk’s blog since it exposes Eric as a low life a-hole using the Boston Marathon attacks to smear ED Voice, a critic like me of McKee and Dazey’s SoHum Community Park scam: ‘
These Progs have not ethics when it comes to attacking critics and censoring critical comments. Here’s what was censored today:
Folks, the Community Park is a flat out rip off development of McKee and Dazey that uses public monies gained fraudulently by private businessmen and their front mouthpieces with Eric being the major one of these shills whose job it is to is to divert criticism of the Community Park plans until subdivision plans are approved for the two businessmen owners who developed the C.P. scam to make a profit for themselves as well as monuments to their egos looking towards big bronze statues of McKee and Dazey at the entrance to the park. How long are SoHummers going to keep still about this racket being run at their expense? Get control of the Community Park back from private parties. That’s the ONLY long term solution to these constant efforts of paid C.P. hacks like Eric to get his bosses’ plans approved by the County so they can make money.
NCJ, also ethically challenged at the head, is censoring me too so we’ll see if this posts..