Boston

In the two months after 9/11, I called Baltimore County police to check out a black-and-tan backpack left by an office door in Towson, reported an abandoned carry-on bag at BWI to Maryland State Police and refused to watch a bulky valise for a stranger who wanted to leave it with me while he went to the restroom at the airport. Anyone who lived through 9/11 remembers those days of hyper-vigilance. And if that uncomfortable state of mind ever left us as the years went by, it certainly returned last week.

Sixty-six runners dashed, jogged and walked through the streets of Annapolis on Saturday to honor the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing and raised money for one of the hospitals that treated their wounds. "When I saw what happened in Boston, I knew we had to do something, and we had to run," said Caitlin Chapman, who organized the race and got quick permission from an Annapolis official to stage the start and finish at City Dock. "It could have been any of us running in that race in Boston," Chapman said, "and it could have been our family members who were standing there watching us finish.

After spending 15 hours Friday locked on coverage of the manhunt in Boston, here are my picks for the highs, lows and deeper media stories of this remarkable day and night. The best moment belonged to Diane Sawyer and ABC News for a phone interview Friday night with George Pizzuto, a next-door neighbor to the man who discovered a wounded and bloody Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lying under a tarp in a boat in his backyard and called police. The interview started at 8:02 p.m., and was the first clear explanation of how the police found the 19-year-old bombing suspect in Watertown Friday night.

- At 2:42 p.m. on Monday - just minutes before the first bomb exploded along the marathon course - Carol Downing's son-in-law and daughters were positioned perfectly to watch her run past the blue-and-yellow finish line painted across Boylston Street. Michael Gross took six, maybe seven or eight, steps away from his wife, Nicole, and her sister, Erika Brannock, until he found the spot where he planned to snap a picture of the moment they had waited for all day. The three had been tracking Downing's progress on their smartphones as her feet touched the timing mats along the route.

As a ranking member of the House intelligence committee, Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger says he was briefed every three hours o n the manhunt for the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings. “Right after the bombs went off, we started getting information,” the Baltimore County Democrat said. He praised the FBI's efforts , saying agents have done an  “outstanding job in this investigation . ” Inside a week, two Chechen suspects were identified and tracked down.

An uncle of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings said his nephews had brought shame to his family and ethnicity, while their father insisted they were innocent and had been framed. The uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, said Friday from his front lawn in Montgomery Village that he had been following news reports and never could have imagined his brother's children were involved in the attack. He and another brother living in the middle-class Washington suburb said they have been estranged from the suspects' family.

- Stores were shuttered and streets were mostly empty Friday morning as a manhunt was underway for a suspect in the marathon bombing that killed three and injured more than 180 others. Police had killed one suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing in a shootout early Friday. Officials said the dead suspect was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and identified the hunted man as his brother, Dzhokar A. Tsarnaev, 19. Law enforcement urged all in Boston to stay home. Natalie Lambdin, a 27-year-old graduate student at Boston College, said the usually bustling area near Copley Square felt "eerie.

NAACP employees were going through the mail Thursday at national headquarters in Baltimore when they found a strange-looking envelope. It bore no return address and had a Memphis, Tenn., postmark - just like letters to President Barack Obama and a Republican senator this week that tested positive for the deadly poison ricin. Within minutes, the FBI ordered workers to evacuate, and emergency responders rushed to the scene. It turned out to be a false alarm; the letter was a request for assistance.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the most frequently heard forecast was: "This changes everything. " Americans would live in constant fear of the next attack, many pundits predicted. The desire for safety would spawn a security state that would trample constitutional freedoms. The economy would take a long-term hit. American life would never be the same. Most of those dire predictions didn't come true, of course. The U.S. economy rebounded quickly. Civil liberties came under stress, but fears of a surveillance state weren't realized.

Within an hour of the bomb explosions in Boston I noticed that the word "Muslims" was trending on Twitter ("'Horrific,'" April 16). As an American Muslim who has experienced bigotry first-hand, I was a bit apprehensive as I clicked to view the tweets. To my pleasant surprise, with the exception of maybe Fox News contributor Erik Rush, an overwhelming number of people - Muslim and non-Muslim - were tweeting in defense of Islam and condemning stereotyping and bigotry. America has indeed come a long way since the days after 9/11, and I couldn't be more proud to be an American and a Muslim.