Boston mourns loss of young blast victims
BOSTON The Boston Marathon bombing claimed the lives of an eight-year-old boy who loved baseball and a 29-year-old woman mourned by Facebook friends who said she died at the scene of the carnage.
The two explosions killed three and injured more than 175, many recovering in hospitals with injuries including lost legs and other lower-extremity wounds from bombs laden with pellets and naillike shrapnel, hospital officials said.
Martin Richard, an eight-year-old from Boston’s Dorchester neighbourhood, was among the dead in blasts that also injured his mother and sister. Krystle Campbell, 29, of suburban Medford also died trying to take a photograph of a friend at the finish line.
Martin was a handsome, talented ballplayer who was “everything you want in a little kid,” said Mike Christopher, the boy’s Little League coach, in an interview.
“He pitched. He played shortstop, third base, first base. He could play anything you needed,” he said. “He was the type of kid you want on your team. It’s hard to take.”
Campbell had “beautiful freckles and bright red hair,” said Medford Mayor Michael McGlynn. She was a “dream daughter” to her father, McGlynn said.
Word of her death spread via social media Tuesday. A friend, Marc Hordon, posted on his company’s Facebook page that she “was seldom caught not smiling and not expressing her opinion.”
The third person killed in the blasts was a Chinese graduate student at Boston University, whose name authorities hadn’t yet released Tuesday.
Most of the wounded suffered injury to their lower extremities, leading doctors to believe that the bomb must have been detonated from the ground up, said George Velmahos, chief of trauma surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. Doctors were treating three primary groups of injuries: internal bleeding, those sustained when falling to the ground from the bomb’s shock wave, and embedded shrapnel particles.