Overland Park man was at stadium near Paris when bombs went off

Overland Park soccer fan James Larson was plenty pumped to be in the stands for the exhibition game between France and Germany in a Paris suburb.

“Best way to start a trip to Europe!” he posted on Facebook as the sides lined up on the pitch.

Later, when he heard the first of the explosions outside the stadium, Larson cheered along with the strangers who sat beside him as the match carried on. After all, at Sporting Park in Kansas City, Kan., where Larson is a regular, fireworks are set off routinely to amp up the crowd.

It was only much later, when the match had ended, that Larson and others in the crowd of 80,000 learned of the suicide bomb attacks beyond the stadium walls. Even then, it wasn’t until he got back to his hotel that Larson learned the extent of the carnage terrorists inflicted elsewhere in the city. The capital’s cellphone network was overloaded, keeping him largely cut off from news reports.

“Looking back, it seemed insane that they continued with the match,” he said by telephone from his hotel Saturday evening.

Still, he reasoned that authorities were cautious. Had the stadium been evacuated earlier, other bombers might have been lying in wait to kill far more than the half dozen who died earlier. In all, the shifting death count from the attacks remained at more than 120, with multiples of that hospitalized.

“We made it out to the main area of the stadium and started towards the exterior gates when there was an extremely loud noise,” Larson wrote later in a blog post. “I don’t know if it was another gunshot or explosion, but the mass of thousands of people panicked and started to reverse course. … Several people fell over and were pushed against walls/barricades.”

Saturday, after the events of Friday night had sunk in, Larson tweeted out his thoughts and observations about a city he has come to know well during frequent business trips.

“Sorry to keep rambling,” he wrote. “The news about the bomber having a ticket has me on edge again.”

Larson headed out on the streets Saturday and went by the Eiffel Tower, where typically thousands gathered. But the day after the attacks, he saw perhaps a hundred. Half of those were police.

Larson, who works for a financial services company based in France, is cutting short his business trip, which began Friday and was to continue through next weekend. He’d planned on attending the big soccer match in Spain between Real Madrid and Barcelona then.

Instead, he’s scheduled to be on a plane back to Kansas City on Sunday because his company canceled the meetings he was to attend.

With terrorists possibly still on the loose in Paris, even that trip to the airport has him on edge.

“I’ll probably be jittery,” he said, “until I get back home.”

This story was originally published November 14, 2015 at 1:30 PM with the headline "Overland Park man was at stadium near Paris when bombs went off."