Local News

Northeastern student abroad recounts the violent attack outside of Stade de France

EPA

By Amanda Hoover @amahoover

November 14, 2015

1 minute to read

Tom Kolongowski, 21, an electrical engineering major at Northeastern University, was seated in the Stade de France on Friday night watching France take on Germany in an exhibition soccer game when he heard what sounded like a cannon, then felt his seat shaking with the vibrations from another blast.

Around 9:20 p.m., the first of two explosions near the stadium went off, according to the Associated Press. Both were suicide bombings that claimed at least three lives near the stadium’s entrance — one of the six attacks across Paris that killed at least 127 people, and injured at least 200 more.

“No one in the stadium had really realized what had happened at the time,’’ Kolongowski told Boston.com. “It wasn’t until the end of the game that they put up on the video boards that there had been an incident and we shouldn’t be using the entrance we had come in.’’

Kolongowski has been studying abroad at Centrale Supelec, a university just outside of Paris, for the past few months. Everyone he knows in the area was accounted for and unharmed by Saturday morning. A statement from Northeastern University spokeswoman Renata Nyul said that all 57 students and faculty members in Paris are safe.

“I think you could tell everyone was worried,’’ he said. “But exiting the stadium, you would think with the threat there would be more commotion. But it was surprisingly calm and quiet the whole way back into the city.’’

Kolongowski, who wraps up his semester in Paris in about a month, was a freshman at Northeastern during the Boston Marathon bombing. He wasn’t on Boylston Street that day, but he remembers how the city felt in the days after the attacks.

Right now, he said, Paris isn’t so different.

“The feeling is kind of the same,’’ he said. “It’s very surreal. It’s hard to wrap your head around.’’

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