'Sights You Don't Want to See': Strat Matsas Shares His Chilling Experience at Boston Marathon

For 40 minutes, Strat Matsas of Elmhurst sat on the steps of a building near the flags at the end of the Boston Marathon route, waiting for his wife, Melissa, to cross the finish line. He ate his lunch, he took a little video, he stood up at the fence line for a couple of minutes.

And then he decided he didn't like the view.

"I was there for 40 minutes waiting. I said, you know what, I'm going to walk up another 100 feet. And I stood underneath the Greek flag—because I'm Greek—for a better view of Missy," he said.

He could move around easily like that because he was by himself. They had decided not to bring their kids along on this trip to Boston.

Within 5 minutes of his decision to find a better vantage point, the first of two bombs went off in the exact spot he had just spend the better part of an hour, killing three and critically injuring scores of others.

"There was a lady directly in front of me. She had long hair, and I saw her hair just blow back, and I saw glass flying toward me," he said. "There was such compression from the blast, like someone blew out your eardrums just from the impact of the air."

He said he immediately knew this was no M-80 or fireworks.

"I said, 'It's a bomb! Run! Go!," he said.

With glass all over him, he began running up the street, unknowingly in the direction of the second bomb, which went off about 15 seconds later.

"I was running toward it, to get away from the first bomb," he said.

At that point, he wasn't sure where to run. The scene was chaotic, he said, with people falling, getting trampled. It was "like a stampede," he said.

"I felt like a rabbit running through a forest getting shot at, and I didn't know which way to run. Which way do I go to not get hit? I felt like I was walking on landmines," he said.

He ran down an alleyway and headed toward Newberry Street, where people had heard the explosion but were unaware of what had happened.

"I was running through the street like Paul Revere, saying 'A bomb just went off! They just blew up the finish line! Leave! Run!' People were just dumbfounded, standing there looking at me," he said.

Melissa was about 1/2-mile from the finish line when she got the call from Strat.

"I said, 'Missy stop!' She said, 'What do you mean, stop? I just ran 25 1/2 miles. I'm not stopping,' " he said.

After he explained what happened, Melissa asked a police officer what was going on, and he hadn't heard about it yet. But within minutes, police farther up the race route got wind of the bombing and stopped the race. Cell phone service was shut down shortly after that, Strat said. He finally was able to meet up with Melissa about an hour later.

Strat said the carnage he saw first-hand "was a sight you don't want to see."

"I'm sure you've heard it all before—blood all over the place, people looking at their wounds in disbelief, their faces, glass and debris everywhere. You've seen it. It's what you've seen on TV," he said.

The photos and video he took before the blast are now in the hands of the FBI.

"They want to know who was standing there before the blast," he said. "They've interviewed me."

While fear was certainly in the eyes of those on the streets, the overwhelming sentiment was anger, Strat said.

"People were pissed off. They were mad," he said. "I was extremely mad.

"These are people who don't have any political or religious agenda. These are athletes. They have nothing to do with your religion, your society or your political views, and you're attacking innocent people," he said of the bombers. "After experiencing this, I know how millions of New Yorkers feel. This was not 3,000 lives, but one life or 3,000 lives, their lives were taken with terror."

He said he has no desire to attend any large, national events anymore.

"I don't feel like going to a Super Bowl game. I don't want to go to the World Series. I don't want to go to the Chicago Marathon. I don't want to go to New Year's Eve at Times Square," he said. "It's changed my whole attitude toward everything now."

He also isn't sure how his mind is going to process his and Melissa's close call.

"My wife was expected (at the finish line) in another 5 minutes," he said. "If I hadn't left the area where I was sitting, I would have been a statistic.

"I was with family yesterday, and we talked about other stuff, but now, today, on the drive back (to Chicago), I'm thinking about it more and more. I keep on seeing the initial blast. It's pretty vivid."

He said he plans to attend church every Sunday now.

"You just don't know. You can't control your time."

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