Explosion at Boston Marathon finish line

Friend of my wife's was in the area. Finished earlier and was not injured. Thoughts and prayers to all.

 

Coincidence or no? The terrorist attacks on 9/11 originated out of Boston too.

 

Fox News reports at 11 p.m. that a Saudi national, 20, at a hospital is being interviewed as a "person of interest."

 

Those attacks originated out of Florida, actually.

Flight schools, entrance visas, etc. ... Google is your friend on this.

 

As they've reported all night, several "persons of interest" are being interviewed. No suspects yet.

But ...

RT @AP: Police investigating blasts near Boston Marathon search apartment in suburb of Revere: http://t.co/61fOVJJx8V - VW

 

Believe the flights from those "graduates" were out of Beantown. Google isn't needed on that.

 

Two left Boston, one left Dulles, one left Newark.

 

Where would you put this in the paper if it's nonlocal. I'd still say, front page centerpiece but I wonder if all papers will do that?

 

I would imbed it as crossword clues.

 

Sudoku.

 

Very first thing I did was go to the marathon's website and do a database search for entrants from our state. Printed that out in case the marathon website crashed. Noted that several were registered as being from a running club; looked up the club on Facebook and started leaving messages and cross-checking profiles associated with the club page.

Then I taught the news folks about split times. The marathon database had finish times of those who had come across, since it's all computerized and connected to the shoe chip. So based on when the finish times cut off, we could tell what time the blast hit (later confirmed to be 4:09). We looked for those folks from our area just over the 4-hour mark, and then we looked for those with split times of around two hours who had not yet recorded a finish time. Figured those were the locals most likely to be at the scene of the blast. We tagged those people and started cross-checking social media for word about them.

Through that and old-fashioned reporting we were able to get some local eyewitnesses.