Boston - Victims of the Boston Marathon bombings got their first official, public forum to describe the death and destruction wrought by two pressure-cooker bombs at the finish line of what had been a celebratory annual event.
Several witnesses who were wounded in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings took the stand in the trial of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to recall details of an attack that killed three people and injured more than 260.
Tsarnaev, 21, is facing the death penalty if convicted of carrying out the attack with his older brother Tamerlan, who died during a manhunt after the bombing.
Rebecca Gregory was visiting Boston from Houston, Texas, with her 5-year-old son, Noah, to cheer for her then-boyfriend's mother, who was running in the marathon.
They were standing near the finish line when the first bomb went off.
“I couldn't see my leg,” Gregory said Wednesday from the witness stand.
When the smoke had settled, she saw blood and shrapnel around her.
“At that point I thought that was the day I would die,” she said.
She tried to pull Noah, whose leg was injured, close to her, but was unable because a bone was sticking out from her arm.
“He kept saying, 'Mommy, mommy, mommy,'“ Gregory said.
“I prayed saying, 'God, if this is it, take me, but let me know that Noah was going to be all right.'“
When emergency personnel got to her, she remembered them mouthing to each other, “We have an amputee.”
Gregory's left leg was amputated 18 months later, after 17 surgeries.
Noah sustained a cut to the bone, gastrointestinal bleeding and had a bald spot on his head.
Sydney Corcoran of Lowell, Massachusetts, was 17, and while she had lived her entire life in the town just outside of Boston, it was her first time attending the marathon because her aunt was running in it.
She and her parents, Celeste and Kevin Corcoran, were waiting for her aunt to cross the finish line when an explosion struck.
“The next thing I know, we're immersed in smoke, there are stifled screams of people you can't see ... because all you see is smoke,” Corcoran said.
She immediately lost track of her family and felt like half of her right foot was gone. She fainted and fell to the ground.
“I remember a man putting his forehead to mine and telling me to told on,” she said.
Shrapnel had damaged her femoral artery.
“I was bleeding from one of my main arteries - I was bleeding out, I had minutes,” she said.
When she arrived at the hospital she was in much pain and thought her parents had been killed.
“And at that moment, I thought I was an orphan, I thought that my parents have been violently ripped away from this world,” Corcoran told the jury.
When she woke up in the hospital, she found out that her parents were alive, though her mother had lost both legs.
Corcoran has scars on the top and bottom of her right foot after shrapnel tore a hole in it. She has long scars from surgeries to repair the damaged artery in her thigh.
Karen McWatters went to the Boston Marathon in 2013 with close coworker Krystle Campbell to cheer for McWatters then-boyfriend, Kevin.
McWatters and Campbell spent the day together taking pictures, some of which were shown to the jury.
As they stood by the finish line, McWatters was sending text messages to find out where Kevin was.
“I remember looking at the phone, and then I was on the ground,” she said. “I was wondering if I was dreaming.”
Then she heard people screaming and telling each other to get on the ground. Eventually, she sat up.
“I looked at my foot and leg and realised that something terrible had happened to us,” she said.
She immediately tried to move close to Campbell, who was lying on the ground next to her.
“We put our faces together and talked to each other. I didn't look at Krystle's body,” McWatters said. “We held hands. When her hand went limp, she never talked again.”
Campbell died on the scene, and McWatters' left leg was amputated two days after the attack.
Sapa-dpa