The Boston Marathon bombing rocked a St. Albert student tour group Friday as they got caught up in a massive manhunt for one of the suspects.
The Boston Marathon bombing rocked a St. Albert student tour group Friday as they got caught up in a massive manhunt for one of the suspects.
Boston officials placed the entire city under lockdown Friday morning as they scrambled to catch Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, one of the two suspects in the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon that killed three people and injured about 180 others.
The second suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died late Thursday after a shootout with police during which the two suspects allegedly robbed a convenience store, killed a university security officer, took a man hostage and hurled explosives from a car.
A group of 19 Sir George Simpson students and three supervisors, including vice-principal Randy Roszell, were on a field trip to Boston at the time, said Krimsen Sumners, associate superintendent with St. Albert Public.
All were safe at a hotel in Woburn, a community 20 minutes northwest of Boston and outside the lockdown area, Sumners said. As a precaution, staff decided to keep the students in the hotel Friday. “We just want to keep them safe.”
The students were in Boston as part of a historical tour that included a visit to Harvard University, Sumners said. They had arrived on Monday about 30 minutes after two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon. The group had originally been scheduled to tour downtown near the blast site, but “we felt it was best to keep them away from the site.”
The group did manage to see Harvard, some whales and the Boston Tea Party Ship & Museum, Sumners said, and have likely picked up a lot of local history. “They seem to be in good spirits.”
Incidents like this are extremely rare on school field trips, Sumners said. “You have a little excitement sometimes, but nothing to this calibre.”
The group was expected back sometime Saturday.
