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Then came the boom roughly a half block away. Minutes earlier the teen had slipped off his backpack and dropped it in the crowd behind a slight woman with red sneakers. He was not looking at the runners but instead smiled at whatever or whoever he was looking at up the sidewalk. He had a white baseball cap flipped backward over a crop of curly black hair and stood near a barren tree. No one in the Richard family noticed the smirking teenager over Martin’s right shoulder. The Richard family’s oldest boy Henry, 10, was on Jane’s left, his feet planted on the sidewalk. Martin’s little sister, Jane, 7, climbed up to his left onto the barricade, leaning her body into their dad Bill who stood behind her. His mom Denise stood to his right, laughing. A frozen still frame of the footage captured Martin, his arms dangling off the edge of the barricade as he scanned the blurs racing by for familiar faces. Best view on the block.Ī news cameraman positioned in the press pen across the street panned to the photogenic Richard family as runners hustled past. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was from Dorchester too and liked to tease Martin, telling him, “You have a smile bigger than Fenway Park, kid.” Martin used that charming smile as he wiggled through the crush of bodies on Boylston Street until he got to the steel barricade that separated runners along the marathon route from the spectators on the sidewalk and stepped up onto a rail. Martin was only eight years old but was already a popular kid, always grinning. That day the sun was surprisingly strong, an unpredictable and rare warm day in a New England spring. They took the train “into town,” as the saying goes, to cheer on the runners from the neighborhood, got some ice cream, enjoyed the crowd. The Richard family, proud Bostonians from an enclave of tight-knit lace curtain Irish in Dorchester, loved Patriots Day. Martin Richard always managed to find the perfect spot along the Boston Marathon route to cheer. Michele McPhee was on Boylston Street within minutes of the deadly blasts that killed three on April 15, 2013.