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 reporters about surviving his second terror attack.
Three years ago, the 19-year-old from Sandy, Utah, was just a block away from a pressure-cooker bomb that exploded while he was watching his mother run the Boston Marathon.
Photo: AP
“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 at just before 8am on Tuesday and said he was running out of the airport when the second blast hit.
Taking a deep breath to collect himself, Wells said he 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.
All three were accompanying a French missionary who was on her way to an assignment in Cleveland. Fanny Rachel Clain, 20, of Montelimar, France, had surgery to remove shrapnel from her body and was being treated for second-degree burns to her hands and face, according to her family.
Two-year Mormon missions spent proselytizing in other states and countries are a rite of passage for young men in the faith. Women are encouraged to serve 18-month missions, but do so at lower rates than men.
There are about 74,000 missionaries around the world. They are part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Utah-based religion that reports more than 15 million members worldwide.
Wells, who had four months left on his mission, was planning to major in engineering at the University of Utah next fall. He also hoped to reapply to the US Naval Academy.
On Friday, he said he would not know what was possible until he knew the extent of his permanent injuries.
“For the moment, I’m just focusing on getting everything better,” Wells said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion