GHENT, Belgium — An American teenager wounded in the Brussels Airport attack is lucky to be alive. And he knows it.
Mason Wells, his face covered in bandages, was in a hospital in the Belgian city of Ghent on Friday, where he told The Associated Press about surviving his second terror attack. Three years ago, the 19-year-old from Sandy, Utah, was just a block away from the pressure-cooker bomb that exploded while he was watching his mother run the Boston Marathon.
“I don’t know if I was born under a lucky star,” he said. “I was definitely fortunate to have escaped with the injuries that I’ve escaped with at the airport, being very close to the bombs.”
Wells, who is on a two-year Mormon mission to Belgium, talked to reporters via a video link from his hospital room, where he lay with a pillow propped behind his head and a light blue towel wrapped around his shoulders.
The former high school football and lacrosse player spoke from behind a mask of bandages, with only his eyes, mouth and left ear uncovered by the gauze dressings and mesh netting that held them in place.
“The blast was really loud,” Wells said in a strong, clear voice. “It even lifted my body a little bit. I remember feeling a lot of really hot and really cold feelings on the whole right side of my body. I was covered in a fair amount of blood, and not necessarily mine even.”
“I remember seeing, you know, fire in front of my face and also kind of fire down by my feet on the ground,” he said. “We were really close, I feel lucky to escape with what I did.”
Wells was at the back of the Delta Airlines check-in line when the first bomb exploded just before 8 a.m. on Tuesday and said he was running out of the airport when the second blast hit.
Wells remembered sitting on the sidewalk outside the airport “in my own blood” and experiencing a feeling of calm and peace that he attributed to the presence of God.
“If there’s anything I’ve taken out (of this), it’s that there’s someone greater than us that’s watching over us,” he said.
Two other Mormon missionaries — Richard Norby, 66, of Lehi, Utah, and Joseph Empey, 20, of Santa Clara, Utah — also suffered serious injuries in the Brussels airport attack.
