John Chandler, a sports anchor for NBC Connecticut, was on the fourth floor of an office building on Boylston Street in Boston, looking out a window near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, when the explosions happened. What he witnessed around him was chaos.
Amid the applause, there was an explosion and smoke.
At first, he thought it might be a generator explosion, or other electronic malfunction, Chandler said, and told everyone to get down and back.
Then the second explosion happened and they learned they had to get out of the building.
“We couldn’t go out the front and it was chaos on the streets,” said Chandler, who was with family, including his infant son, and friends.
“We had to go down the fire escape in the back. Halfway down the final two stories, the escape wouldn’t drop. It was broken, so we jumped from one escape and climbed over to the next one,” he said.
Down below, people were trying to pull that escape down to help.
Chandler knew family and friends were safe, but was concerned about what was going on around him as people cried and emergency responders rushed to help the injured.
“These are my neighbors here, these are my streets, and you just don’t want to see anything bad happen to your town,” Chandler said, adding that he does not know how you get over this and that we should always remember.