On Patriot's Day in Boston, explosions shattered the afternoon's festivities, as tens of thousands of participants were concluding the Marathon.
My heart goes out to those people right there as the bombs went off, and to the rest of the citizens in Boston who were traumatized today.
Alisdair Conn, chief of emergency services at Massachusetts General Hospital, said: "This is something I've never seen in my 25 years here ... this amount of carnage in the civilian population.
This is what we expect from a war battlefield."
-- The President of the United States, in his address to the nation earlier today, said that Boston "is a tough and resilient town," adding that Americans will stand by Bostonians "every single step of the way."