BOSTON (AP) — With a bagpiper playing “The Bells of Dunblane” and a few runners looking on, families of those killed in the Boston Marathon bombing marked the 10th anniversary of the tragedy early Saturday by slowly walking together to the memorial sites near the finish line and laying wreaths.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who was making her first run for City Council when the bombing happened, joined the somber procession along with Governor Maura Healey. At each memorial site — marked with three stone pillars — they stood with the families in silence.

Thousands, including many marathon runners in their blue and yellow windbreakers and several former Boston Red Sox players, came out to a second ceremony Saturday afternoon near the finish line. Church bells were rung and the Boston City Singers and Boston Pops performed “Amazing Grace” and “America the Beautiful.”

The 127th running of the Boston Marathon takes place Monday.

Three people were killed and more than 260 were injured when two pressure-cooker bombs went off at the marathon finish line. Among the dead were Lu Lingzi, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China; Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford, Massachusetts; and 8-year-old Martin Richard, who had gone to watch the marathon with his family.

During a tense, four-day manhunt that paralysed the city, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Officer Sean Collier was shot dead in his car. Boston Police Officer Dennis Simmonds also died a year after he was wounded in a confrontation with the bombers.

Police captured a bloodied and wounded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the Boston suburb of Watertown, where he was hiding in a boat parked in a backyard, hours after his brother died. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had been in a gunfight with police and was run over by his brother as he fled.

“I think we’re all still living with those tragic days 10 years ago,” Bill Evans, the former Boston Police Commissioner, said recently.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death and much of the attention, in recent years, has been around his bid to avoid being executed.

A federal appeals court is considering Tsarnaev’s latest bid to avoid execution. A three-judge panel of the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston heard arguments in January in the 29-year-old’s case, but has yet to issue a ruling.

The appeals court initially threw out Tsarnaev’s death sentence in 2020, saying the trial judge did not adequately screen jurors for potential biases. But the US Supreme Court revived it last year.

The 1st Circuit is now weighing whether other issues that weren’t considered by the Supreme Court require the death sentence to be tossed a second time. Among other things, Tsarnaev says the trial judge wrongly denied his challenge of two jurors who defense attorneys say lied during jury selection questioning.

The bombing not only unified Boston — “Boston Strong” became the city’s rallying cry — but inspired many in the running community and prompted scores of those impacted by the terror attack to run the marathon. At the memorial sites Saturday several flower pots with the words “Boston Strong” held what have become known as Marathon daffodils.