On April 15, 2013, the day of last year’s Boston Marathon, both Scott Helman and Jenna Russell, longtime reporters for the Boston Globe, were far from the scene of the finish-line bombings. Helman was in a Home Depot, buying plants for his garden. Russell was in a coffee shop fine-tuning a story she was working on.
But like many people in and around Boston that day, Helman and Russell would have their peaceful Patriot’s Day holiday suddenly, and drastically, disrupted.
In the hours, days, and weeks following the marathon bombing, Helman and Russell were among the major contributors to the Globe’s comprehensive coverage of the tragedy, which killed three people, injured hundreds more, and scarred forever a New England tradition. Russell, for instance, interviewed dozens of people affected by the bombings, including a Boston police officer who helped comfort spectators severely injured on Boylston Street. And as a resident of Watertown, Mass, where bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was finally captured, Helman filled his notebook—and Globe reports—with eyewitness accounts.
Once the story began to recede from lead-news coverage, the two reporters, who joined the newspaper on the same day in 2000, began collaborating on a book that would encapsulate and contextualize what took place on Marathon Monday and beyond. Their recently published account, A Part of Hearst Digital Media: Boston Under Attack, the City’s Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (Dutton), provides a riveting and intimately detailed account of the events that shook the city and the nation. More than collecting and retelling facts, Helman and Russell humanize their work by featuring five individuals whose personal stories serve to link the various groups—from victims to heroes, from runners to spectators—who were affected once the bombs went off.
While Helman and Russell have not run the Boston Marathon, they note in the following interview with Runner's World Newswire that by living and working in Boston, they have come to understand the race’s hold on the city. And now, after spending a year reporting on the marathon’s most fateful day, they say their appreciation for the race, and what happened to it last April 15, is even clearer.
(Interview has been edited for space and clarity.)
Runner’s World: With so much having been written in the past year about the marathon and the bombings, what were you hoping to achieve with A Part of Hearst Digital Media? Did you find it challenging to bring nuance to a subject that has been so thoroughly covered?
Jenna Russell: That’s a good point. The key to us was the decision early on to tell it through individual people [affected by the bombings]. Our sense was, that was going to make the story-telling different....We wanted to find some people whose experiences were dramatic and important [yet] different from one another. People we could spend a lot of time with and go deep with their stories. Individuals who would serve as guides through a complex and complicated narrative. Each [person] allows us to open a window into different aspects of the story.
RW: Those five people—what or who do they represent?
Scott Helman: We thought of the kinds of people you would want to have. Of course, you would want to have a spectator who was wounded, because that was such a big part of the story. Sadly, so were the three people who were killed, so we wanted that perspective. There were the first responders—they played a key role—and we knew we wanted some kind of police figure. Amazingly, and this was a sad irony, but if [this tragedy] was going to happen, it was the best case that it happened here [in Boston] because of the city’s world-class medical establishment, so we wanted to bring that story to life.
Once we had the general idea of the kinds of people we wanted, we set about finding them. So we ended up focusing on Shana Cottone, a young cop who was working a detail that day on Boylston Street [near the finish line] and was very critical in helping to save the lives of a couple of very wounded people. We had Heather Abbott, from Rhode Island, who was meeting friends at a bar on Boylston Street and unfortunately happened to be standing nearby [when the bombs exploded]—and later had the wrenching decision to have her leg amputated. Krystle Campbell was going on 30, a woman from Medford, Mass., and like Heather, she was there just to watch the race, and she was standing right near the first bomb when it went off. [Campbell was one of the three victims who died that day.] David King is our doctor figure. He had worked on soldiers in Iraq and is a doctor at Massachusetts General and a marathoner himself. He had run the race and was home just a few minutes when he found out what had happened and raced to the hospital to begin working on people. And because the marathon is so important to Boston, we went to Dave McGillivray [the race director], who is a legendary figure in the running community. He would add that perspective.
When you have those five people, that gives you a broad swath of the stories. It grounds the larger, complex story for people.
RW: How did you gain the individuals’ confidence so they would share their stories one more time with you?
Russell: That was the hardest task that we faced because we were approaching them so soon after everything had happened. They were trying in those first few months to get clear of the event and to move away from it, and we are going to them and saying, “Please revisit it. We want you to be our guide to everything that happened.”
It is such an enormous thing to ask them to go through and to do it under a time pressure. [The authors wanted A Part of Hearst Digital Media to be available by the first anniversary of the bombing.] Normally you have more time to build a relationship with someone first. It was tricky. In some cases it was easier than we thought because some people were ready to tell their stories. Others struggled, and we had to work with them so they that would come out on the other side feeling good about their decision to share what had happened.
I think all of these people would tell you they were glad to do the book, but it wasn’t always an easy road for them or for us. We felt a tremendous responsibility to the story and to do it right and do right by them and the city.
CA Notice at Collection A Part of Hearst Digital Media, Health & Injuries?
Helman: You don’t have to be a serious runner to pursue the specialness of the day. You live here long enough and you are part of the tradition of Patriot’s Day. It is clear what a wonderful celebration it is. As we say in the book, it is about good health and fellowship and this great fraternity runners share that you don’t see in other sports. By now, having lived here for 25 years, I get it.
Russell: I thought about this a lot. For me personally, I don’t love running, but I want to love it; I make myself do it. But after spending a lot of time with Heather Abbott, the woman who ended up losing her leg—she was a runner before this, and watching her try to come back and to learn to run again with one leg, I can honestly say—and this may sound cheesy—that whenever I am out running and I am hating it and I want to stop, I think about Heather and what she goes through to try and run and how much it means to her. And then I feel very conscious and more grateful than I ever did before because I can go out and run and not have to think about.
I have run more this spring than I have ever run in my life, and part of that is wanting to do it because I can do it.
Helman: There is a line deep in the book from McGillivray that I think is really true. One thing that he figured out early on is that running makes you better at everything else. It gives you the space and the mental acuity to be a better parent or a better colleague or worker or whatever it is. I believe in that strongly. I cannot not run. I am barely functional if I don’t.
RW: A lot of runners who ran last year and were not injured were still emotionally affected by the events of the day. Neither of you were physically at the finish line that day, but you have immersed yourself in the story. Have you been emotionally affected by it?
Helman: I think in some way we didn’t have time for that, we were so focused on the story and getting [the book] done. And yes, to an extent, we are desensitized to these types of stories because as journalists we cover them from time for time. Jenna and I worked together on 9/11.
But you cannot be immune to the power of these stories, particularly when so soon after it happened you are talking to people who have lost a daughter or a leg. And these are difficult conversations. Even though the book has a third-person narrator, we both put our hearts into it. I feel that now. This anniversary is going to be very emotional for everyone, and I don’t exclude us.
Russell: As Scott points out, we were very focused on the project, but I had moments in interviews with these people where I cried. Heather likes to joke that she is not a crier or a self-pitier. And there were times [when I was interviewing her] and I would start to cry and she would not be crying.
We have been doing some readings of the book lately, and one day we were looking at chapter 5; it’s the chapter where we tell of the first ten minutes after the bombings occurred. And we read this one paragraph and we had the same reaction, that this a brutal, brutal thing that happened. It hit us really hard, and I had to stop for a minute and recover.
RW: When you do look back on that day and the days that immediately followed, what’s locked in your memory?
Russell: For me, one of the first things I reported on was this incredibly dramatic situation that happened at the finish line with the police officer Shana Cottone. She was with these two people who were badly hurt. You had at this finish line all these awful things happening at the same time, and people have described it as time slowing down. For [Cottone] it was a profoundly life-changing experience. She was connecting with this woman who was badly, badly hurt, and Shana is kneeling there, holding her hand, and she is taking her driver’s license out so she knows the woman’s name, and trying to talk to her and keep her present until an ambulance can get to her. This is only a few minutes but to hear her tell this story—I will never forget that image of these two strangers bound together forever by this awful event and this friendship that has come out of it because Shana was there to be with her at that time.
Authors Discuss Their Book "A Part of Hearst Digital Media".
Helman: In part just being in Watertown that Friday when we didn’t know where [Tsarnaev] was and everything was suspicious. The cops had cordoned off the streets. Just the eeriness of that day was unlike anything I had seen or experienced. That is the part I will never forget. Standing on the streets as convoys of police vehicles raced by, and not knowing at any moment something really bad was going to happen.
You knew it was going to end, but you didn’t know what the script called for.
RW: What will you do on Patriot’s Day this year?
Helman: I plan to go whether or not I’ll be at the finish line or on Comm. Avenue or somewhere else. Like so many people here, I want to have a return to the good experience I used to have.
Russell: I’ll definitely be there for some part of it. I would love to spend a little time at the finish line. In some ways it is going to be a difficult day, but my hope is that seeing all these people come out, more than ever before coming together, there will be a hopeful and positive feeling coming out of it, and people will see how far we have come from what happened.
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