A high-ranking member of the Connecticut State Police finished the Boston Marathon and was with his family near the finish line when the bombs went off.
Major Alaric Fox, the chief of staff to the state police commander, spoke about the ordeal during an interview in his office at state police headquarters in Middletown on Wednesday morning.
"(The) Boston (Marathon) is just the granddaddy of them all," Major Fox said. "It was a tremendous day up until the unimaginable happened."
It was the second time he ran the Boston Marathon. He finished the race in three hours, seven minutes and four seconds, which was more than an hour before the two bombs went off.
He met up with his wife and two children and they were getting ready to eat lunch inside the Prudential Center on Boylston Street, not far from the marathon's finish line, when the explosions happened.
"There were two rapid-succession, very loud explosions and even from where we were, you could hear them," said Major Fox. "People that were in the building were running out of the building. People that were out of the building were running into the building because no one knew exactly what had happened."
As the chaos escalated, Major Fox and his family quickly left the building.
"At that point, we moved down toward where the street was and saw that one direction was where the carnage was and the other direction appeared to be the safer of the two routes," said Major Fox.
They made it safely away from the targeted area, still unsure of exactly what happened. Now, they know all too well the details of the terrible tragedy that hit so close.
"Life is precious and it's just a game of seconds. Ten seconds faster or 10 seconds slower and any individual performance is vastly different on that day," he said.
Despite what happened, Major Fox said he's determined to run the Boston Marathon again.
"I'm proud as a member of the law enforcement community to be among those people that do what we can to make the world as safe as it can possibly be but I don't think any of us can live in a bunker and never expose ourselves to any danger," he said.
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