Witnesses describe scene of carnage after Boston Marathon blasts

Boston: Roupen Bastajian, a state trooper from Rhode Island, was receiving his finisher's medal after the completing the Boston Marathon when he heard an explosion behind him. He thought it was a cannon, something ceremonial. He turned and saw the second blast, and ran toward the white smoke, hoping to help anyone he could.

"I ran over there and there were at least 40 people that I saw on the ground, some without legs," said Bastajian, 35. "It's bad, it's bad."

"These runners just finished and they don't have legs now," he said. "So many of them. There are so many people without legs. It's all blood. There's blood everywhere. You got bones, fragments. It's disgusting. It's like a war zone."

Bastajian, who was a sergeant in the Marines for four years, had finished in 4 hours 2 minutes 42 seconds at 2:43 p.m., about 7 minutes before the first blast. If he had been a few strides slower, he might have been among the dozens of victims Monday when bombs exploded at the marathon. Instead, he was among the runners treating other runners, a makeshift emergency medical service of exhausted athletes.

"We put tourniquets on," Bastajian said. "I tied at least five, six legs with tourniquets. It's horrible."

Bruce Mendelsohn, a public relations professional, was at a celebration on a third-floor office above where the explosion took place. His brother, Aaron, had finished the race earlier.

"There was a very loud boom, and three to five second later, there was another one," said Mendelsohn, 44, an Army veteran, who immediately recognized the noise because of his training. "I ran outside. There was blood smeared in the streets and on the sidewalk."

He said that on first glance, there appeared to be 10 to 12 fatalities, including"women, children, finishers," but that he could not be sure. The wounds, he said, appeared to be "lower torso."

"The type of stuff," he said, "you see from someone exploding out."

Mendelsohn, who went to try to help members of law enforcement cordon off the area, said it appeared that the explosion came from a cafe near 667 Boylston St., near the finish line.

"This appeared to be deliberately at a time when people were finishing," said Mendelsohn, who said he served in South Korea and Germany.

People immediately tried to evacuate the area. "Everyone is heading over the Mass Ave bridge," he said, calling it a "mass exodus."

Like many of the people in and around Boston, Mendelsohn snapped photos from above the explosion and shared them on Twitter. One photo he posted showed what appeared to be blood on the streets.

Ricky Simms, the agent for Micah Kogo, who finished second among elite men, said the elite runners had all sat down for a meal when they heard the noise.

"We were in the dining room," Simms said. "We just heard two noises and people were saying: 'Oh, is it thunder? Was it some accident? Did a window fall out of a building?' Nobody thought it could be an explosion."

Dave Watt, executive director of the American Running Association, said he was standing in the middle of the street, facing the finish line from beyond it, taking photos of runners when the first blast went off. A medical tent was nearby.

Within 30 seconds of the explosion, doctors and assistants were running toward the scene, he said.

"Thank God this medical tent is here where this happened," Watt said. "It could have been much worse. Because you had doctors racing down there, putting people in wheelchairs and bringing them back, within two or three minutes of the explosion."