“From the Front Lines”

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Over night, as I was monitoring events and trying to report what we could confirm in the editor’s blog, I was so focused on phone reporting, monitoring twitter and monitoring police scanners, that I oddly neglected what has always been one of TPM’s core ways of collecting information, our emails from you. I followed the situation from the first alert about the shooting at MIT until about 6 AM when I turned things over to the rest of the team and got a few hours of sleep. I’d missed reports like this one from TPM Reader CM sent in at 1:36 AM last night …

I’m a Prime subscriber and a long-time reader. I live on Dexter Ave. in Watertown, Mass. where we just experienced what I can only describe as war.

It started as what sounded like firecrackers. But the pattern was somehow strange and quickly didn’t feel like firecrackers. And then, the first of the explosions. Deep thunder, just down the street. Sirens followed, the sound of cars screaming down the street, squealing around corners. A friend texts us to turn on the scanner online. “Officer down” two short blocks down. My sense of the time that elapsed between the first pops to the last is non-existent. Throughout that time, we were terrified that someone was going to come running up our stairs and bust into our apartment. I had to tell my wife that we might have to run or defend ourselves.

The gunfire stopped. Afterwards, police cars, local and state, litter our street. Some police running around, others walking. Down the street, someone was loaded into a stretcher. A helicopter just flew overhead.

Meanwhile, my wife and I stayed in our bedroom, checking social media and boston.com. Your tweet was one of the first non-Boston-based mentions I saw, and I just wanted to share… from the front lines of Watertown.

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