ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Karen DiLisio stands with her Boston Strong shirt. She was running the Boston Marathon on Boylston Street when the bomb exploded.
By GAYLA CAWLEY
LYNN — “Patriots Day,” a movie about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and the subsequent citywide manhunt for the two suspects, will be released in theaters today, but two Lynn survivors, Karen DiLisio and Jordan Avery, are uneasy about it.
“I don’t really plan on seeing it,” said DiLisio, who ran the 2013 Boston Marathon. “It was too devastating.”
DiLisio, a custodian for Lynn Public Schools, said she was less than a mile away from the finish line, or 25.79 miles in to be exact, when two bombs went off near the finish line, killing three spectators and wounding more than 260 others.
Four days later, police captured then 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The other suspect, his older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a police shootout earlier that day.
“I was just running along right at the end … before you get to the bridge and I see a bunch of people running toward us,” she said. “There’s a bomb at the grandstand. …Your whole body just becomes like an ice cube. From that moment on, everybody was just like panicking, crying, screaming.”
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DiLisio said she was on the slower end of her time for the race, because she was a charity runner for the Boston Police Association Cops for Kids with Cancer. She didn’t see the bombs go off, but saw the smoke go off in the sky, and thought it was some kind of celebration. She didn’t realize what happened until people running toward her said it was a bomb.
The Lynn runner said her husband, mother and her then 5-year-old son, Luke, were waiting for her at the finish line and saw when the first bomb went off. DiLisio said it took her a while to get in touch with her husband in the aftermath, since she doesn’t usually run with a cell phone. She was walking around borrowing people’s phones.
Despite the chaos, she and her family were uninjured. But her son was traumatized for a while. DiLisio said she had to bring him to the doctor a few times. The following year, she ran the marathon again, but told her husband and son to stay home. She plans to run again next year, for her seventh marathon.
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Avery was a medical first responder at the finish line. He was assigned to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) that day, and was expecting to deal with dehydration issues and potential cardiac events from runners. But he said first responders are always prepared for mass casualty incidents.
Avery said he plans to see the movie today. He was asked to participate in the movie, along with other survivors and first responders. At first, he accepted the invitation, but after sitting and thinking about it, he changed his mind.
“That situation that day was a real situation,” Avery said. “It was an act of terrorism. I remember it every day. I don’t go one day without thinking about what happened at the 2013 marathon … I just thought that participating and being there would bring back more flashbacks and I didn’t really want that to happen.”
He’s prepared for seeing live video from the bombing when he goes to see the movie. Avery said just seeing the trailers has brought flashbacks. He’s hoping that the movie sticks to the facts and doesn’t add to what happened.
“I’m all for watching,” Avery said. “I just hope it’s what actually happened and not glorified … I hope they don’t treat it as a moneymaker.”
The movie stars Dorchester native Mark Wahlberg, J.K. Simmons, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon and Michelle Monaghan.
Gayla Cawley can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @GaylaCawley.