Wayland Marathoner, Family Can Now Begin to Heal

The past several days have been anything but peaceful for Wayland Boston Marathon participant Alexis Avila and his family.

Avila was at mile 25, , when two bombs exploded there, killing three people and injuring 170 others.

Physically, the Avila family was unscathed. The emotional wounds, however, were deep.

But on Friday, Avila says, those wounds found the salve they needed as he and his wife, Sandy, learned that one bombing suspect was dead and, that night, that the second suspect was in custody.

16 Hours Glued to the News

Avila and his wife awoke Friday morning without any idea of what had transpired overnight.

"We didn't know anything about what was going on with the manhunt," Alexis Avila says. "We were awoken by my wife's work who left her an automated call telling her not to go to work."

His wife works at Athena Health, which is located in Watertown ... on Arsenal Street ... in what turned out to be the middle of a manhunt.

It brought the previous seven days oddly full circle, Avila says.

"My wife's week started last Friday with a bomb scare at her work where they evacuated the whole company," Avila explains, adding that he has no idea whether that scare was in any way connected to the marathon bombings. "And it ends a week later with SWAT troopers on top of her building."

On top of all that, Sandy Avila is from Watertown.

For the next 16 hours, Avila and his wife watched the news of the day unfold from their home in Wayland, while Sandy Avila's family in Watertown kept them posted with texts and phone calls and updates of "inside information" from a police scanner.

Avila says he felt some relief when he learned that the first of two suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had been killed overnight, but he knew that wasn't the end.

"When the first guy was killed, I felt like -- I kinda looked at this as a football game in a way," Avila explains. "I was excited that the one guy was down, but we were still down in the game. And it was the fourth quarter."

But he was confident that law enforcement would prevail, and he figured that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was the younger of the two suspects and he was counting on Tsarnaev being "more naive" and lacking the "savviness" to elude investigators for long.

When 6 p.m. rolled around and investigators announced they were lifting the Watertown lockdown and larger shelter-in-place advisory, Avila says they felt "disappointed, let down."

"We were completely exhausted at this point," Avila remembers. "But personally, I had a feeling that maybe the cops knew something we didn't. Maybe the suspect was kind of hiding and watching this somewhere and, maybe us letting our guard down, would make him let his guard down."

And perhaps that is what happened, perhaps Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did let his guard down, but it doesn't really matter.

What matters, is that within about two hours of making that announcement, Tsarnaev was in custody.

"We did a shot," Avila says. "Honestly, we had a couple of shots of lemon vodka. We toasted, we hugged, we sighed. I pumped my fists in the air and said 'Yes!'"

Avila says his wife has had trouble sleeping peacefully in the days since witnessing the bombings, but Friday night, that night, it was better.

"Twenty minutes after that, we crashed," Avila says. "We were so tired."

A New Chapter

After such a tense and emotionally taxing week, the Avilas awoke Saturday with the feeling that their healing can now really begin.

"We felt like now we can start to heal," Avila says. "We feel safe, and it's the next chapter."

But before they turn the page completely on that next chapter, Avila's 2-year-old goddaughter, Samantha, wanted to make sure her godfather closed this chapter with a token of joy.

Saturday morning she presented Avila with a homemade version of the medal he never got a chance to receive at the Boston Marathon finish line.

"Marathoners don't quit," Avila says, recognizing that there is still a road to healing ahead. "We stay optimistic; we're not going to let these guys win. Be patient, support my wife and family as they heal."