April 17, 2015 by Jason Kornwitz

The four­some marked the second anniver­sary of the Boston Marathon bomb­ings on Wednesday evening, meeting up for dinner at a restau­rant in the city’s North End neighborhood.

The col­lege kid, the fire­fighter, the police officer, and the real estate exec­u­tive have made a habit out of keeping in touch over the past two years, tex­ting, emailing, and hanging out for the heck of it.

“We’ll see each other more this time of year,” said the col­lege kid, Shores Salter, a fifth-​​year chem­istry stu­dent at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity. “It’s nice to be with them,” he added, “but it’s dif­fi­cult because it brings back some tough emotions.”

Those emotions—fear and agony, sad­ness and anxiousness—date back to April 15, 2013, Boston’s darkest day.

Salter, S’15, and his col­lege bud­dies had turned out to Boyl­ston Street to cel­e­brate the 117th run­ning of the Boston Marathon, an annual tra­di­tion that had begun in their freshman year. The real estate exec­u­tive, Roseann Sdoia, had been attending the race ever since child­hood. An avid runner, she had found a prime viewing spot behind a makeshift fence to watch the run­ners cross the Boyl­ston Street finish line. The police officer, Shana Cot­tone, had been working the finish line, a last-​​minute assign­ment switch with another officer that had asked to work the Boston Common with his car­pool pal.

At 2:49 p.m. Salter and his friend were walking toward that leg­endary blue and yellow line—that indelible marker of pure ath­letic bliss—when they heard a loud boom. At first, Salter thought that it was the sound of cel­e­bra­tory can­nons, fired in honor of the first fin­ishers. “But then I thought that didn’t make sense,” he said. “The win­ners had fin­ished three hours ago and I had never heard them let off can­nons before.”

Moments later, he heard the second explo­sion and looked across the street to see smoke, blood, body parts. He hopped the guardrail and sprinted over there to see if he could help. “I don’t have a great answer for why I stopped and went toward the second bomb,” he said, noting that he and his friend had gotten sep­a­rated amid the chaos. “It was fate.”

Salter then heard someone yelling, calling for assis­tance. It was Sdoia, whose right leg had been badly injured. He picked her up and car­ried her into the center of the street. He removed his belt and turned it into a tourni­quet to stanch the bleeding. He applied pres­sure and he waited for pro­fes­sional rein­force­ments to arrive—one minute, two…Cottone arrived, and tried making small talk with Sdoia. “Shana did a good job of talking to Roseann,” Salter recalled. “She asked her what was going on to keep her conscious.”

Someone secured an air cast to Sdoia’s leg, and then a back­board mate­ri­al­ized. Salter, Cot­tone, and others helped to secure her body to the back­board, and then the fire­fighter arrived, a vet­eran named Mike Materia who’s served tours in Iraq. He held Sdoia’s head, waiting in vain for one—just one—ambulance to stop. But none did—they were filled with other victims.

Even­tu­ally, Cot­tone stopped a pris­oner trans­port vehicle and she, Salter, and Materia—as well as a pair of other fire­fighters on the scene—lifted Sdoia into the police van. From there, she was trans­ported to the Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­eral Hos­pital, one of some 260 bombing vic­tims on that fateful day.

Salter did not imme­di­ately know what hap­pened to Sdoia, whether she lived or died. He strug­gled to sleep through the night, he later told reporters, and ques­tioned the effi­cacy of his self­less act. Sdoia, for her part, described the col­lege kid to jour­nal­ists as her “mys­tery angel,” and won­dered whether she would ever meet him. She rec­og­nized him in a photo from the scene—an image of him applying the makeshift tourni­quet to her leg—but she did not know his name, nor he hers.

Then, a break­through: A few weeks after the bomb­ings, Boston​.com ran the photo. One of Salter’s friends posted the image to Face­book, and a local news sta­tion called him up, wanting to run a seg­ment on his heroics. The story aired, and then he got another call: Guess who.

Sdoia and Salter embrace at the Student Life Awards, where the real estate executive presented the college kid with the Shores C. Salter Award for Outstanding Citizenship. Photo by Maria Amasanti/Northeastern University.

He recon­nected with Cot­tone and Materia too—the fire­fighter is now the real estate executive’s boyfriend—and the four random people quickly formed an unbreak­able bond. Salter and Sdoia, who learned to walk on an arti­fi­cial limb, recently par­tic­i­pated in a 5K Run/​Walk in Lowell, Mass­a­chu­setts. “That was the first time that I’ve gone on a lengthy trek with her,” Salter said. “She’s def­i­nitely trying to push the limits and make her new reality as close to normal as possible.”

He added: “She’s accepted what hap­pened to her and decided to keep moving for­ward with her life. After seeing that, I’ve tried to adopt that men­tality and accept things for what they are.”

Sdoia sur­prised Salter on Thursday evening, pre­senting him with the inau­gural Shores C. Salter Award for Out­standing Cit­i­zen­ship at the annual Stu­dent Life Awards cer­e­mony. The award hon­ored Salter’s bravery, courage, and com­pas­sion in the face of chaos, and will hereto­fore rec­og­nize stu­dents that make out­standing con­tri­bu­tions to the local or global com­mu­nity through ser­vice, lead­er­ship, and dedication.

“There is no one that reflects [Northeastern’s] values as much as Shores,” said Sdoia, who gave Salter a big hug when he stepped up on the Curry Stu­dent Center Ball­room stage to receive his award. “In an instant, without hes­i­ta­tion, he ran into the chaos and tried to make a dif­fer­ence.” She added: “He helped to save my life and would become part of my family, as I would become part of his.”

Salter, who received a standing ova­tion at the awards cer­e­mony, noted that his defin­i­tive plans for the 119th Boston Marathon are still up in the air, but acknowl­edged that he’d be seeing his trio of new friends at the iconic race. “The marathon bomb­ings were awful and hor­rible, but some good has come out of that day,” he said. “It united the four of us, and we’ve been able to keep that rela­tion­ship going.”

Shores Salter, pictured here, did not immediately know what happened to Sdoia, whether she lived or died. He struggled to sleep through the night, he told reporters, and questioned the efficacy of his selfless act. Photo by Brooks Canaday/Northeastern University.