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Victims testify at Boston Marathon bombing trial

Marc Fucarile, who lost his leg in the Boston Marathon bombings, left court on Wednesday.John Tlumacki/Globe Staff/Globe Staff

Sydney Corcoran said she felt her body grow cold, was told her eyes were fading, and knew at 17 that she was bleeding to death. Rebekah Gregory said she glimpsed her own bones protruding from her body; she offered a prayer, hoping that the 5-year-old son who had been at her feet moments before was still alive.

And amid the acrid smoke and twisted metal, Karen Rand reached out and grabbed Krystle Campbell’s hand. The two friends had been laughing and cheering in the sunshine at the finish line. Now their heads were so close they were almost touching, their mangled bodies splayed in different directions on the blood-soaked pavement of Boylston Street.

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“She very slowly said that her legs hurt, and we held hands,” said Karen Rand — now Karen McWatters — testifying on the opening day of the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. And then “her hand went limp in mine. She never spoke again after that.”

Accompanied by raw, unsparing photos and videos offered as exhibits by prosecutors, the three survivors took the stand and spoke in vivid detail about experiences they had rarely shared beyond their closest friends and relatives and interviews with authorities since the Boston Marathon bombing.

For the wider survivor community — for the “Boylston Street family” that they now speak of, united by life-altering blasts, by loss, and by two years of struggle and healing and grief — this was a day that had loomed for so long.

Some watched from the courtroom, including relatives of 8-year-old Martin Richard and 23-year-old Lingzi Lu, two of four people Tsarnaev is accused of killing. More gathered in a private courtroom down the hall set up with a video feed of the trial, away from the public and the media.

Some victims wanted no part of the experience. Others could not imagine being any place else. Marc Fucarile, a 36-year-old Stoneham roofer who lost his right leg above the knee, had said of Tsarnaev, “I want to see him, and I want him to see me.” He came to court on crutches, without his prosthetic, the effects of the bombing unmistakable, unignorable.

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Fucarile’s friends Paul and J.P. Norden, brothers who each lost a leg, avoided the court, one in Wakefield, the other in Bermuda. Their mother, Liz, went, speaking softly as she left court afterward. The testimony rocketed her back to the day that she nearly lost both of them, and made her realize how many families had endured what she had. “The people that testified today, their stories were similar to my boys’,” she said.

In his opening statement, Assistant US Attorney William Weinreb spoke clinically but evocatively of the carnage, describing how a bomb “tore large chunks of flesh out of Martin’s body” and partially blinded his mother, Denise Richard, who tried to comfort him as he bled to death. Bill Richard, Martin’s father, had been blown into the street and came to the curb to try to help up Martin’s sister, Jane. “When she tried to stand up, she fell down again because her leg was no longer attached to her body,” Weinreb said.

On the stand, Gregory wept as she pointed to an image of herself on the bloodied pavement. She recalled the terror of being thrown back and separated from her son. She thought she was dying and prayed, “God, if this is it, take me, but let me know Noah is OK,” as a relative picked up Noah and laid the crying boy beside her. Gregory told the court she underwent 17 surgeries to try to save her ravaged left leg before amputating it last fall.

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Corcoran, now a sophomore at Merrimack College, remembered trying to walk and crumpling to the street. “This isn’t real. How could this be real?” she thought at the time. “Everything was so happy a few seconds ago.”

Waking after surgery with tubes in her mouth, she said, she scrawled a note to her father beside her, asking about her mother, Celeste. He started to weep, explaining that her mother was alive but had lost both legs. “I don’t care. I just want my mom,” she said.

At one point during Sydney Corcoran’s testimony, Martin Richard’s father put his head in his hands and looked down.

When she was done, her mother rose on two prosthetics and followed her daughter from the courtroom.

McWatters described how much fun she and Campbell had that day. They beamed as they posed like tourists for a photo on a Public Garden footbridge, en route to the finish line to cheer McWatters’s boyfriend, Kevin, now her husband.

“That’s the picture,” she said, as a prosecutors displayed that photo, and then others. She bit her lip and looked away as they prepared to show the image of the two friends strewn on the sidewalk, the last time she would ever see Campbell.

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McWatters, who had her left leg amputated two days after the bombing, left the court holding her husband’s hand. “It’s a struggle,” he said, of reliving that day through the trial.


Milton J. Valencia and Shelley Murphy of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com.