The Boston Marathon bombing 10 years later: MassLive’s look back at the tragedy, its lasting impact and the people who inspired us.
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When he arrives at the Boston Marathon’s medical tent on Boylston Street on Monday morning, Pierre Rouzier will be thinking about what he saw, what he did and what happened not far from that spot 10 years ago.
But it won’t be the anniversary of the bombing that sparks his memory or the tributes to those who died and those who helped that will be prevalent around the 127th running of the annual race.
Rouzier, a 66-year-old doctor from Amherst, thinks about that day every day.
Sometimes the memories are more intense than others, but they’re never far from the surface.
Rouzier, a former sports medicine doctor for the UMass athletic department, spends much of his semi-retirement on his bicycle. His upcoming ride from southwest England to the northern tip of Scotland follows prior trips from Vancouver-to-Mexico, New Orleans-to-Canada and Portland, Oregon to Boston.
Somewhere in Wyoming, about a thousand miles into his 4,000-mile horizontal passage across America, he had to unexpectedly swerve to avoid something in the road. It looked liked part of a deer’s leg. He didn’t stop to examine it, but surmised it was likely the result of a vehicle-animal collision.
But it flashed him back to Boston when he’d jumped over a severed leg running to help victims at the gruesome scene that day. For the next 3,000 miles, those images popped back into his head at a pretty regular loop.
It doesn’t always take an animal limb. Flipping through television in a New Orleans hotel landed him unexpectedly on Patriots Day, the Mark Wahlberg movie about the events that day. The movie itself was largely panned and Rouzier didn’t watch all of it, but he caught enough of the scene near the finish line and his own internal memories filled in the rest.
Rouzier was working his fifth Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. He was part of a group of four - two doctors, a nurse and a nurse practitioner, who worked together in the tent, 25 yards beyond the Boylston Street finish line. Most of the runners enter the tent with conditions connected to dehydration, heat or fatigue.
When he heard the first blast, he thought it was a celebratory sound, maybe a noise cannon, somebody’s overeager way to mark a loved one crossing the finish line.
“But it was way too loud for that,” Rouzier said back in 2013. Nearby someone on the tech crew speculated out loud that maybe a piece of electronic equipment had exploded.
When he heard the second blast and saw the smoke rising, Rouzier and fellow doctor Chad Beattie, a close friend, spoke for a moment. Rouzier texted his wife and sons, “I’m going to where the bomb went off. Say a prayer” and the two men ran toward the smoke.
At the scene, they found horrific injuries.
“The image of the guy whose legs were blown off is burned in my mind,” he said back in 2013.
Belts became tourniquets and they used anything they could find for makeshift splints. They hurried, not just to save lives and preserve limbs as injured spectators were loaded into ambulances. Police were hurrying them out of the area, fearful that there might still be more bombs.
They retreated first to the medical tent, but due to its proximity to the blasts, that was cleared out too. The runners couldn’t get there anyway. The professionals and elite amateurs had already finished. The runners still on the course were the ones most likely to need medical attention, but the doctors and medical staff weren’t sure where to find them. So they wandered toward Boston Common where many had been sent and tried to do what they could.
In the months and years that followed, Rouzier tried unsuccessfully to find one woman he treated. She had an open leg fracture with the bone protruding through the skin of her lower leg.
“You know, I’m going to die right here and right now and nobody is going to know where I am,” she said to Rouzier. He treated her, comforted her and got her onto a gurney and into an ambulance. But he never learned her name and to this day wonders how she came through.
It was a defining moment in how people see him. Rouzier was the team doctor for the UMass hockey team when it won the National Championship in 2021. He has pictures of him holding the trophy above his head. But friends often introduce him to strangers based on where he was and what he did 10 years ago.
“I don’t really bring it up. I could just be meeting somebody new and someone will say Dr. Rouzier was at the bomb site of the Boston Marathon,” he said. “I’m like ‘OK I guess I’ve got to re-live this now.’”
It’s changed how he sees himself, too, and how he interacts with the world around him.
News of a tragedy, even thousands of miles away, starts his mind racing.
“Every time there’s an incident. I think ‘What would I do in that situation?’” he said.
If he were younger, maybe the fear of leaving his children fatherless might have made him more careful. But his sons Anthony and Nicholas are grown. He’s not reckless, but he’s less hesitant than he would have been as a younger man.
“I’m old enough and I’ve had a very good life. I’m prepared to help in any way,” he said. “If it takes my life when I’m helping, I’ll be fine with it. ... I think I would be brave enough to do something.”
For a long time, anytime he was in a department store, he gravitated toward the belts. The rational part of him knew he was unlikely to ever be back in a similar situation to the one he faced in 2013. But still, he kept making mental plans. Next time, he wanted to be even more ready. That meant having a perfect belt to transform into a tourniquet.
He found one in the American Eagle store in Rye, New York.
“It’s got a two-ring buckle that you pull through tight,” he said like a proud new car owner listing its fancy features.
It’ll be around his slender waist on Monday holding up cargo pants. He equips himself like medical Batman with the pockets on those pocket-plentiful pants subbing for the utility belt. On his person throughout the day, he’ll have his belt, scissors, gloves, another combat rubber tourniquet, gauze and a pocket mask. He’ll notice the snipers atop the nearby buildings and wonder what other safety measures are in place that he can’t see and he’ll get to work.
Most likely he’ll spend most of the day handing out barf bags and ice bags to runners who have pushed their bodies to the limits, treating and greeting people who have checked an event off their bucket list. But he’ll be ready if this day or any other turns tragic again. The combination of the normal joy, his camaraderie with his four-person team and the sense of duty to be there, just in case there ever is another tragedy will keep him coming back every year.
“We have bonded so much because of this, we’ll probably never not want to be there. You can ask where am I going to be on the third Monday of April, I’ll be at the Boston Marathon. I will keep renewing my Massachusetts Medical License even if I’m never practicing medicine at all, just to be able to be at the Boston Marathon,” he said. “It’s my favorite thing to do. There’s nothing like volunteering at the Boston Marathon.”