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Americans are still struggling to make sense of Tuesday’s tragedy at the Boston Marathon, where two bombs near the finish line exploded, killing three people and injuring more than 175 others.
The cable news networks continue to focus most of their energies toward covering the latest developments in the investigation of the incident.
STORY: Boston Marathon Bombings: How the Morning Shows Covered
Here are five developments as of late Tuesday:
1. The media report details on the three fatally wounded victims.
Three people were killed in Monday’s bombing. Martin Richard, an 8-year-old from Dorchester, Mass., loved the Boston Red Sox and the Bruins. “He wore his (Red Sox second baseman) Dustin Pedroia shirt to school last week,” his neighbor Bill Forry told CNN, adding that he was a good athlete and student and often helped out schoolmates who were struggling with their homework. Krystle Campbell, 29, from Arlington, Mass., often went to watch the marathon runners. “She’s been doing it since she was a little girl,” her grandmother Lillian Campbell told the Boston Globe. “She didn’t miss a marathon, watching it at the finish line.” Campbell, who would have turned 30 on May 3, had recently taken a job at Jimmy’s Steer House in Arlington. A third, unidentified female victim was a Boston University graduate, the school said. China’s consulate in New York said that the deceased victim was a Chinese national but did not identify her at the family’s request, CNN reported.
2. The 8-year-old victim is mourned.
Richard was remembered by a crowd of several hundred people in a Boston area park late Tuesday. “We are saddened and shattered by the fact that he will no longer run, and smile, and jump, and play, and live, and love among us,” pastor John Connolly told the crowd, according to NBC News. Richard was standing near the finish line with his family Monday when the explosions happened. During the blast, his mother suffered a brain injury and his 6-year-old sister lost a leg, NBC News reports.
3. Doctors describe the horrific injuries.
Tufts Medical Center in Boston, which is located about a mile from the finish line, was one of several hospitals to treat the wounded after the explosions. A total of 19 patients from the marathon were treated, with 14 having injuries that came directly from the blasts. At a Tuesday press conference, Dr. William Mackey, chief of surgery at the hospital, said that all of the blast injuries contained shrapnel, according to CBS News. Demonstrating how strong the force of the explosion was, Mackey revealed that one woman had the handle of a zipper embedded in her ankle. “It was small shards of metal,” Mackey said of what most patients had. “There were some people that were cut by flying glass, but most of the material was small metal.”
STORY: Boston Marathon Bombing: Late-Night Hosts React to Tragedy
4. Family Guy hoax draws criticism from Seth MacFarlane.
The “Turban Cowboy” episode of Fox’s Family Guy, which premiered March 17, culminates with a scene depicting Peter Griffin accidentally blowing up a bridge by dialing a terrorist’s cell phone. But in an edited video making the rounds online, the cell phone scene is placed immediately after an unrelated moment in the episode when Bob Costas, voicing himself, asks Peter how he won the Boston Marathon. “The edited Family Guy clip currently circulating is abhorrent,” creator Seth MacFarlane wrote on Twitter. “The event was a crime and a tragedy, and my thoughts are with the victims.” On Tuesday, Fox removed the episode from Fox.com and Hulu.com.
5. Networks remain cautious in their reporting.
Mistakes that plagued coverage of recent tragedies including the mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater last summer and the January 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords have made the networks cautious in their reporting of news related to the Boston Marathon bombing. “The key is to be precise about what we know and what we don’t know,” said Rachel Maddow, who scrambled to get to Boston on Monday afternoon even as New York airports temporarily grounded all flights. “You don’t want be forcibly ignorant when something is obvious and having your viewers be very far ahead of you in terms of what seems clear.”
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