DeAnne Weaver, left, is reunited with Brendan Pratt and his family after Weaver rode her bicycle from Buffalo to Albany, New York, in July.
Submitted photo
On the day the Boston Marathon was rocked by a bombing at the finish line, DeAnne Weaver and her sister Beth Carr were less than a mile from that finish.
Weaver and Carr were fortunate not to be in the vicinity of the bombs that killed four people and injured others in April of 2013. Instead, they were left at a standstill near the intersection of Commonwealth and Massachusetts Avenues as the queue of runners in front of them were forced to stop.
“We couldn’t tell where, but somewhere in front of us, everybody stopped, and it just backed up,” Weaver said. “We were never told. Nobody came through the crowd to say, ‘We’re going to temporarily stop. We’re going to totally stop.’ There was nothing said to us. We just stopped. There were so many people ahead of us, we couldn’t go any further.
“Once we had stood there for probably 15 minutes, a lot of police and EMTs, emergency people on foot were running down the median,” she added. “That kind of alerted us that it was something pretty bad. Up until that point, we had thought maybe somebody had just had a heart attack on the course, and they were stopping people.”
DeAnne Weaver, left, and her sister Beth Carr make their way through the 2013 Boston Marathon before the race was stopped.
Submitted photo
It was a cool morning, and Weaver and Carr started getting a little chilly. So they and several other runners wandered into Mass Ave Tavern.
“There was not much resources for the runners to know where to go,” Weaver said. “We didn’t have warm clothes. We didn’t have money. We didn’t even have our cell phones with us. So we had no information out to the crowd or to the people that did not get to finish where to go, what to do, how to access our bags that were at the finish line. It was a cool day, and when you’re running, of course you get warmer, and we had gotten sweaty and we had run almost 26 miles, but then when you come to a stop, then you start getting cold.”
Some other runners that they didn’t know had money, and they invited Weaver and Carr to sit with them and shared food with them. They sat there and tried to figure out what to do and what had happened at all, because at that time, they did not know what had transpired at the finish line.
“We were hearing people in the crowd talk about an explosion that had happened, but we didn’t know it was bombs,” Weaver said. “We thought maybe it was a gas explosion, or we didn’t know what it really was. So we started watching their televisions in the bar to get more information, and they started talking fairly early on that it was possibly bombs.”
Meanwhile, a local Bostonian named Brendan Pratt was at the tavern celebrating his 27th birthday. He noticed Weaver was cold and lent her his jacket.
“He had a Carhart jacket, and he offered to let me wear his jacket in the bar to let me get warm,” Weaver said. “My sister, somebody had given her a trash bag, so she was wearing a trash bag. I was wearing his Carhart jacket, and once we had kind of gotten our bearings a little bit, we decided we’d go outside and see if we could tell where to go to get our bags. We knew we were going to have to walk a ways, but we needed to find the bags that had our warm clothes, our IDs, our phones, our money, all that kind of stuff. So before we went outside, I offered his coat back to him. He said, ‘No, you keep this coat. You might need that. I said, ‘I don’t feel right taking your coat, so how about this — we’ll leave it at our hotel when we leave, so you’ll have your coat back,’ and he said, ‘That will be fine.’”
The problem was, their hotel was 25-plus miles away, back near the starting line in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. The shuttle services had stopped, so they did not have a good way to get there.
“We had to find a way to get ourselves back to where our hotel was, which was a problem because nothing was going after that,” Weaver said. “There were no services in town, no cabs. There were supposed to be shuttles that took us back there, but once that tragedy happened, they did not have that service provided anymore.”
So Weaver and Carr ended up in shelter that the Red Cross was providing. Finally, around 10 p.m. that night, the Boston Athletic Association chartered a bus to take the eight-to-10 people that had been taking shelter there back to their hotels.
Fortunately for Weaver and Carr, they did not have to catch a flight back to Indiana until a couple days later. Weaver left Pratt’s jacket at the hotel.
“The people in Boston were so incredible,” Weaver said. “They would come out of their houses and invite you into their house for dinner. They said, ‘We made a big pot of chili. We made a big thing of spaghetti. Come and have dinner with us.’ Or, they came out of their house with snacks and drinks, and they were just passing them out to runners. It was pretty incredible.
“Somebody had given us a big Snickers bar, and we had not eaten that, so we took a $20 bill, and we wrapped that Snickers bar in it and put it in his coat pocket,” she added. “So when he came to pick up his coat at the hotel however many days later, he found that $20 bill in it.”
Brendan Pratt holds his jacket that DeAnne Weaver had returned to him after he had lent it to her at the previous year’s Boston Marathon.
Submitted photo
But that wasn’t the end of their story. The runners who were unable to finish the 2013 race were given the opportunity to come back and run in 2014. So Weaver returned with her husband Rob, and Rob and Brendan watched the race together, cheering for DeAnne when she passed the Mass Ave Tavern.
Although she did not return to Boston, DeAnne and Brendan kept in contact in subsequent years, usually around the time of the marathon and Brendan’s birthday. In the meantime, Brendan got married, had three children and moved to Albany, New York.
This summer, Weaver, now 63, and two other women from Columbus were planning to ride from Buffalo to Albany along the Erie Canal. So she got in touch with Brendan.
“I knew I was going to do this ride across New York State,” Weaver said. “I contacted him a couple months before and told him, ‘Hey, I know I’m going to be close to you. I’d love to meet up with you after this ride, but I won’t have a vehicle because I’m going to be on my bicycle. He said, ‘I think this will work great. We can come and meet you.’”
At the end of the 360-mile ride, Brendan and his family were at finish line holding signs celebrating Weaver’s arrival. She got to meet the wife and kids of the man who had provided her with a kind gesture on an otherwise bleak day 11 years earlier.
“I just think it’s really neat that such a young man was so empathetic to our plight, and we struck up this special friendship,” Weaver said.
