Life After the Boston Marathon Bombing

How a young journalist covered a victim’s road to recovery

On April 15, 2013, life changed for twenty seven year old Jeff Bauman. As he waited for his girlfriend to finish the Boston marathon, there was explosion. Bauman lost both his legs in the blast.

Timothy Rohan was covering the marathon as a freelancer for The New York Times. He said that he got the assignment by chance because none of the regular running writers were free. This was another break after a stroke of luck had him covering Johan Santana’s no hitter earlier in the year as an intern at The Times.

Rohan wrote one story about Bauman in the immediate aftermath of the bombings and a second longer piece detailing his recovery process. It was the second story, titled ‘Beyond the Finish Line’ that landed him a job at The New York Times and earned him a Pulitzer nomination at twenty three.

How it all began:

When the bombs went off, Rohan recalled, he had been writing a profile on another runner at the media center, located in business center of what he describes as an old ornate downtown hotel. That profile was no longer the story.

“Once it happened, basically The New York Times descended on Boston,” Rohan said, and marching orders were to find and profile a victim or a family who could tell what happened at the finish line. The reporters split up and the plan was to stake out hospitals and try to speak to someone.

Waiting to get some updates on the victims, Rohan like other journalists and photographers thronged outside a hospital for almost five hours. Well past ten that night, there was press conference and the media crowd dispersed when it was over.

But Rohan took a shot, driving to Boston Medical Center, the other hospital in town. “I walked in the lobby, its about eleven o clock at night, it’s quiet, the lights are off and there’s no one in the lobby.”

That’s when he saw two young people walking and stopped them to ask if they knew anyone who had been hurt in the marathon — they were Jeff Bauman’s half brother and step sister.

The first story:

The next morning, Rohan reached the hospital early and met with Bauman’s father, also Jeff Bauman. The family was in a state of shock, but Rohan admits that having met the siblings the night before, helped his case with the senior Mr. Bauman.

He recalls the first interview with Bauman’s father. He introduced himself as a journalist with the New York Times hoping to do a story on him and his son and, “it all just started pouring out of him, as if he needed someone to talk to,” Rohan said.

Dealing with victims or families that have been traumatized can never be easy for reporters but Rohan believes that empathy and honesty are crucial to navigate the conversation.

“There’s no blueprint, you’re honest with him, you’re open with him and sensitive to how he’s feeling in the situation. You talk to him like you would as if it was a friend, the difference is that you have to explain to him in a sensitive way that you want to write a story about him and his son. I think if you approach it with that kind of mindset. Its not that complicated.” Rohan said.

Rohan interviewed Bauman’s father and step mother for about forty minutes about how they discovered that Jeff Bauman had been injured when his step sister saw him on the news. After the interview, Rohan went across to a nearby Starbucks and filed his first story on Jeff Bauman. It was titled ‘In Grisly Image, Father Sees His Son’.

The next project:

While he delivered on his assignment, Rohan was determined to pursue the story further. “I don’t think it naturally occurred to me what the final thing would look like, but I knew I wasn’t going to leave after that first story, “he said.

His editors concurred, and for the rest of the week Rohan’s job was to stay in touch with the family, visit the hospital and meet with Bauman’s parents. His persistence paid off when on the Friday following the marathon, he was invited to meet Jeff Bauman. Bauman was in his room at the hospital, recovering after surgery, where only friends and family were allowed.

By this time, the editors at The Times had decided that Rohan should undertake a project reporting on Bauman’s recovery. He explained the idea to Bauman and asked him if he would be comfortable with a journalist hanging around.

Rohan said he’ll never forget what Jeff Bauman told him, “My dad trusts you, I trust you.”

Moments of doubt:

Since he had never undertaken a project as long as this one and he didn’t know how long this story would take, Rohan said he was extremely scared. In fact, when The Times assigned photographer Josh Haner to the story, “I had second thoughts about whether to call the guy or whether to just give it up there and go back to covering sports,” he said.

Documenting the recovery process was a long and somewhat an uncertain project. Rohan admits that there were times that he felt that the whole story would fall apart. But a conversation with himself and long nights with photographer Haner helped figuring out how to make the story happen.

One big factor he had to contend with was Bauman getting bombarded with requests from other media, television channels, other newspapers and even Oprah. Another interview would have been a deal-breaker for Rohan’s story. “Our thing was that we wanted to take the time and do this right. We didn’t think the story would have the same power if he was appearing on Oprah,” he said.

Reporting on the recovery:

The hardest part about doing this story, according to Rohan, was to build a relationship and trust with Bauman and his family. He is very proud of the access that both he and Haner had to the Baumans, especially with in times of highly competitive media.

Both Haner and Rohan spent a lot of time driving to Boston from New York, sometimes a couple of days a week. They wanted to spend as much time with Bauman and his family to catch details of his recovery process, medical procedures, his routine, his interactions with his friends and family, his visit to a Red Sox game and even a bachelor party he attended after he was discharged from the hospital.

Rohan said that spending so much time with Bauman helped them capture the rich details of not just the planned procedures but unplanned “raw moments” such as those Bauman shared with his girlfriend.

The story also describes in graphic detail, a scene where Bauman is having his sutures removed. It is a vivid narration ranging from the conversations Bauman had with the doctor to the expressions on his face. Rohan and Haner were present in the room, documenting the scene that was so raw that, according to Rohan, at one moment even Bauman’s mother left the room.

“The thing with the videos, the photos and the story, what we were trying to do the whole time was trying to relate that emotion of what it would be like for the reader if the reader was sitting there in the room while this guy was having the sutures removed.”

Was it difficult for Rohan to cope with what he witnessed? He concedes it was uncomfortable to watch Bauman in pain, but he said that he was consumed by trying to capture every detail, and that focus helped.

Writing the final story:

Rohan spent three weeks writing the story after Jeff Bauman took his first steps with his prosthetic legs. That was the ending Rohan had been waiting for.

He began piecing the story together, writing and rewriting, reading out drafts aloud and even consulting friends. He sent out drafts to some colleagues at the New York Times and a few friends like his college newspaper college Nick Spar and Zach Helfand to get their feedback.

“I’d be up calling him (Zach Helfand) at midnight, talking over whether a clause should be at the beginning or at the end of a sentence or little stupid things down to sentence structure,” Rohan said.

After weeks of writing, he submitted his first draft. It was 10,000 words long and was promptly chopped down to close to 4500 words by the editors at The Times.

While Rohan admits some edits were harder than the others, he clearly recalls that he resisted when an editor suggested a change in the lede. The editor felt that the suture removal scene was the most intense and gripping scene in the story and would make a good lede.

Rohan admits that like any other writer, he was married to his lede, but gave up resisting eventually when he realized that it worked better.