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Body parts, bloody streets and broken glass marked the end of Boston’s most celebrated event yesterday.
In one moment, cheers filled the crisp New England air for the runners who willed themselves across the Boston Marathon’s finish line.
Seconds later, two deafening explosions shattered the festive spirit, creating mass panic that sent athletes and spectators sprinting for their lives.
“There were people all over the ground,” said Roupen Bastajian, 35, a state trooper from Smithfield, RI, who had just finished the race.
“We started grabbing tourniquets and started tying legs. At least 25 to 30 people have at least one leg missing, or an ankle missing, or two legs missing,” he said, helping victims while still wrapped in his post-race heat blanket.
Thick, acrid smoke filled the Back Bay neighborhood. Ambulances clogged the streets and sirens wailed.
“You could smell it — it smelled like a giant firecracker,” Beck Dangler, who was on a fifth-floor patio overlooking the finish line, told NBC News.
“Then there was immediate pandemonium . . . and then the immediate scatter.”
Witnesses described a war zone — shocked victims were hobbling around without arms and legs, searching for help.
One of the three dead was an 8-year-old child. More than 130 were injured.
“They just started bringing people in with no limbs,” said runner Tim Davey, of Richmond, Virginia.
Davey said he and his wife, Lisa, tried to shield their children’s eyes from the gruesome scene inside a medical tent, but “they saw a lot.
“They just kept filling up with more and more casualties,” Lisa Davey said. “Most everybody was conscious. They were very dazed.”
First responders and doctors quickly turned the runner medical tent — meant to care for exhausted marathoners — into a triage center, pulling ball bearings from the explosives out of bloody flesh and preparing legs for amputation.
“We all went running over there and started to bring people into the medical tent,” said one doctor.
“It was not good. Very bad. Like a war zone. 9/11 immediately came to mind.”
The mangled victims were then loaded in to ambulances.
“There are people who are really, really bloody. They were pulling them into the medical tent,” said runner Laura McLean, of Toronto.
“It was very fortunate those medical tents were there,” Don West, a freelance photographer who was covering the marathon, told The Post.
“They took a lot of people there. Without those tents a lot of people may not have gotten immediate medical attention. There was a massive response. The first responders came very quickly and en masse.”
At first, many of the tens of thousands of spectators thought the blasts were part of the night’s ceremonies. Most people near the explosion just froze, unsure of what to do.
“All of a sudden I heard this bang that sounded like a cannon,” Rachel Sibley, 22, who was at the finish line waiting for a friend, told ABC News.
“You could see people looking up at the sky like there were fireworks, like a celebratory bang. The whole crowd waited for a moment, and then the second one went off. It was terrifying and absolute chaos.
“You could see the panic in people’s faces. It was absolutely terrifying.”
Friends and family members who were waiting for runners at the packed finish line panicked, desperately wondering if their loved ones were among the casualties.
“I was expecting my husband any minute,” said Cherie Falgoust.
“I don’t know what this building is. It just blew. Just a big bomb, a loud boom, and then glass everywhere. Something hit my head. I don’t know what it was. I just ducked.”
Her husband survived.
“My friend was right there, and I can’t get in touch with them. I just started running. We heard a noise and heard the glass shatter. Everyone was running in different directions,” Andrea George, 39, who was watching across the street from the blast, told the Globe.
“It was the scariest thing I ever saw.”
One Massachusetts woman, Brighid Wall, 35, of Duxbury, told how she and her husband threw their children to the ground, lay on top of them and got another man to lay on top of them.
“Don’t get up, don’t get up!” they screamed.
“My ears are zinging. Their ears are zinging,” Wall said. “It was so forceful. It knocked us to the ground.”
After a minute or so without another explosion, Wall said, she and her family headed to a Starbucks and out the back door through an alley.
Around them, the windows of the bars and restaurants were blown out.
She said she saw six to eight people bleeding profusely, including one man who was kneeling, dazed, with blood coming down his head.
Another person was on the ground covered in blood and not moving.
At Massachusetts General Hospital, Alasdair Conn, chief of emergency services, said, “This is something I’ve never seen in my 25 years here . . . this amount of carnage in the civilian population. This is what we expect from war.”
Thousands of marathon participants still running when the blasts went off were halted by police, clogging main streets.
“I saw barriers fly and I knew that it was not right so I stopped,” runner Whitney Hunter, who was about 300 yards away from the blasts, told NBC News.
“My wife was right across the street. She saw people laying in the road.”
And the MBTA subway ground to a halt, preventing riders and spectators from getting away from the scene.
“You heard this huge noise and a rumble, and then two . . . transit police started yelling at everyone to get out of the station,” Amanda Fahkkredine, 25, told ABC News.
“They didn’t seem to know what was going on.”
Marathoners began hobbling up the stairs at the Arlington subway station, she said, and back into the war zone.
“We heard it, and we had no idea if there was a train crash or car accident. It wasn’t like anything that I’ve ever heard or felt before. It was like an earthquake sounding like a car crash.”
Runners who were unscathed marveled at their good luck.
Bill Iffrig, 78, from Washington State, was 15 feet from the finish line when the blast knocked him to the floor. The chaotic moment was caught by a photographer in the dramatic image above.
“The force from it just turned my whole body to jelly, and I went down,” Iffrig told the Seattle Times.
“I thought, ‘This is probably it for me.’ ”
Iffrig, who is listed as one of the nation’s best long-distance runners in his age group, managed to escape with only a scraped knee and decided to get up and finish the race.
“Somebody came by with a wheelchair, but I said, ‘I’m fine.’ I wanted to finish.”
Michigan’s Greg Meyer, the 1983 Boston men’s champion, was running with his sons Danny and Jay.
“I grabbed my medal, went to the VIP tent to get my clothes and boom,” Meyer told the Boston Herald.
“I told Danny, who was struggling the last three miles. I said, ‘Thank God you kept running because the three of us would have been there right about then.’ We all ran the whole way together.”
The National Guard set up a staging area at Boston Commons — a stark turn of events for the annual race, which is held on the Patriots’ Day holiday, celebrating the first battles of the American revolution.
Revelers attending post-race parties in an office building just above the blast site said the explosion knocked them to the floor.
“There was like a flash, then a giant boom. The concussion blew me off the couch onto the ground,” said Bruce Mendelsohn.
The former Army medic rushed outside and found blood, glass and debris everywhere and began applying pressure to “gruesome” wounds.
“This stuff is more like Baghdad and Bombay than Boston,” said Mendelsohn, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“It was pretty terrifying.”