American Brussels Survivor Mason Wells 'Felt Fire in Front of My Face'
Mason Wells' experience in Belgian attack was his third brush with terrorism.
— -- The teen Mormon missionary who was injured in the Belgian terror attacks this week says he was just feet away from the first explosion at the Brussels Airport.
“I was actually in the back of the Delta check-in line when the first explosion went off,” Wells, 19, said today on “Good Morning America” in a phone interview. “I was about 10 to 15 meters away and the blast was really loud.”
“I remember being picked off the ground and I had some really hot and really cold sensations on the whole right side of my body, the burns ,” Wells said, adding that he was conscious during the explosion and afterward. “I felt fire in front of my face and also down the front of me.”
Wells called himself “lucky” to just have the injuries he sustained, which are said to include a ruptured Achilles tendon, shrapnel injures, as well as second- and third-degree burns on his face and hands.
Wells was one of three Mormon missionaries injured in the Brussels terror attack that killed at least 31 people and injured at least 300. The teenager was also at the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, though uninjured, and was in Paris in November during the attacks there that killed 130 people, though not in the immediate vicinity.
The teenager said he is relying on his faith to make sense of his third brush with terrorism.
"My faith is something that’s my whole life," Wells said. "It’s sustained me and it’s something that’s been built upon even by these experiences."
"My parents always told me that everything happens for a reason and I don’t know why I was in those places," Wells said. "I’ve been in certain places when certain things happen. The only message I would have is that I believe that God, he has a plan that’s a lot bigger for us than maybe we may imagine."
Eyewitnesses told Wells' parents that their son remained calm in the aftermath of the airport bombing.
"I think that there’s only one person that could have helped me stay as calm as I did and that would be God," Wells said. "The peace and calm that I was able to feel, it was something that was beyond just the physical shock of my body."