CAMBRIDGE — From a distance, life on this stretch of Memorial Drive seemed to be going on as normal. A popular route for joggers, cyclists, and parents pushing strollers, it stayed that way Tuesday morning.
But the chaotic outbreak of violence here just a day earlier, when authorities say a gunman unloaded scores of bullets seemingly at random into passing cars, seriously injuring two, was not easily forgotten.
As of Tuesday, people living in a building near where the suspected shooter, 46-year-old Tyler Brown, of Boston, allegedly unleashed a barrage, still had to step over caution tape seemingly left behind, and past some numbered yellow evidence markers stacked up near a sidewalk.
A patch of the busy path along the Charles River was still stained crimson with blood. A ripped-open package reading “Combat Gauze” lay on the pavement — although it wasn’t clear if it was related to the shooting or just some kind of grisly coincidence.
And it wasn’t the first time life had gone on here after scenes of violence.
The same intersection of Memorial Drive and River Street back in 2013 was the site of the daring escape during the hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
It was here that graduate student Dun Meng, who had been carjacked and held captive by the Tsarnaevs, dashed out of a parked car at a Shell gas station and across the street to a Mobil convenience store, where he alerted police, sharing valuable information about the brothers’ whereabouts.
“It’s a famous intersection,” said Cheryl Chen, 54, a Somerville resident and Harvard faculty member out for a jog along the river. She said it crosses her mind as she passes by the gas stations that they once had a brush with infamy after the bombings.
Tuesday, though, she had something else to ponder. “I drive through here all the time,” Chen said. “So the thought of someone shooting at cars is pretty terrifying. I could have easily been here.”
As he stopped at the intersection on a jog toward the water, neighbor Jeff Hawson, 50, said he remembered the aftermath of the bombings, and the lockdowns and manhunt that followed, well. He said he’s more likely to reflect on the events as he jogs past the memorial to the slain MIT officer Sean Collier in Kendall Square.
Compared to that, the intersection of Memorial Drive and River Street doesn’t hold much significance for him, Hawson said, even after Monday’s shooting added a new, grim chapter in its history.
“I don’t think this intersection is haunted,” Hawson said.
More notable, said Hawson, a software engineer who is a dual US-Canadian citizen from Vancouver, is that gun violence remains so prevalent in his adopted country.
“I feel as safe here as I did any other day, which is to say not all that safe,” he said. “There’s a lot of violence here that I’m not used to back home. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with it, but it is what it is, I guess.”
Others criss-crossing the intersection Tuesday also said they found it hard to shake the feeling that they might have found themselves being fired upon at random had their timing been just a bit different.
Denise Ryan, 61, and her partner, Tim Palmer, 64, said they heard of the shooting while en route to the area Tuesday from North Carolina. They had come to scope out the city, and to preview the walk between a nearby hotel and the Harvard campus, where she was planning to spend part of June and July studying at the Extension School.
The idea was to see if the walk felt safe, she said. Which, on this sunny spring morning, she said, it did.
“It’s perfect,” Ryan said. “That was a very unique, one crazy person. That’s not Boston.”
Still, there was the nagging thought that things might have gone differently had they planned their reconnaissance trip earlier.
“I thought, ‘What if we’d been here yesterday?’” Ryan said.
Steps away, in the Charles, rowers were making their way down the river under blue skies.
A day earlier, one rower had the surely terrifying experience of passing by just yards away from the shooting as it played out on the river’s edge. Video shot from a distance and posted online shows a person rowing solo, and a coach in a separate boat tagging along, as the suspect apparently makes his way up the sidewalk and the pop-pop-pop of rapid gunfire can be heard.
Rowers who answered the door at several boathouses along the river on Tuesday all said they couldn’t talk with reporters, but said the shooting had not done much to disrupt practice. One college rower said his teammates were back on the Charles by Monday afternoon.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, at the intersection where Monday’s violence played out, two women stood at opposite sides of River Street burning incense and rhythmically shaking wooden rattles, in what one of them said was a ritual.
“We’re trying to clear the energy,” she said.
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.