After the twin detonations 12 seconds apart ripped through the cheering crowds 50-yards away lining Boston's streets at around 2.50 p.m - one witness told CNN that it 'felt like a huge cannon'.
Bill Iffrig, 78 and a veteran marathon runner, was almost at the finish when 'the shock waves just hit my whole body and my legs just started jittering around.'
Iffrig, can be seen in video of the explosion wearing an orange tank top, and was helped to his feet by an event volunteer and had just a scratch from his fall, he told CNN.
Others were simply stunned by the carnage they witnessed.
'In 28 years, this is definitely the worst I've seen,' said District Fire Chief Ron Harrington of the Boston Fire Department's District 3 to NBC News.
'Bodies and body parts. Blood all over. A little boy lying in the street. A young woman in her twenties. Both dead. It was mayhem. I saw two people with arms hanging loose, and one without a leg. A shoe with flesh still in it.'
Right after the blasts, police officers could be seen carrying bloody spectators to medical tents intended for exhausted runners in desperate attempts to save lives.
The fiery twin blasts took place about 10 seconds and about 100 yards apart, knocking spectators and at least one runner off their feet, shattering windows and sending dense plumes of smoke rising over the street and through the fluttering national flags lining the route. Blood stained the pavement, and huge shards were missing from window panes as high as three stories.
'They just started bringing people in with no limbs,' said runner Tim Davey of Richmond, Va. He said he and his wife, Lisa, tried to shield their children's eyes from the gruesome scene inside a medical tent that had been set up to care for fatigued runners, but 'they saw a lot.'
'They just kept filling up with more and more casualties,' Lisa Davey said. 'Most everybody was conscious. They were very dazed.'
Dr. Ron Walls, chair of emergency medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, told ABC News that he had not identified any shrapnel, such as ball bearings, but saw a lot of 'street stuff' that had injured their patients.
'Rocks, bits of metal, soda cans, anything that is really close to a blast like that can be fragmented,' he said.
'Everything we saw was ordinary material that could have been propelled by the device.'
Boston police and federal officials descended on an Ocean Avenue apartment complex in Boston to search the home of a person of interest
FBI warned police to be on the lookout for a 'darker-skinned or black male' with a possible foreign accent in connection with the attack
Hospitals reported at least 144 people are being treated, with at least 17 of them in critical condition and 25 in serious condition.
At least eight of the patients are children - including a two-year-old boy with a head injury
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