The Miracles That Kept This Latter-day Saint Missionary Alive After the Brussels Bombings

Disclaimer: The details included in this story and in Mason Wells's book about his injuries and experiences may be graphic to some readers. Read at your own discretion.

"I'm dead."

The thought glanced across Mason Wells's mind as he took in the destruction all around him. Black smoke permeated the air, creating the ethereal illusion he was standing alone among the wreckage. 

Then the smoke parted. He was not alone. Around him lay the crumpled, blackened forms of other victims.  

Wells's body quickly dragged him into reality, excruciating pain flaring to full intensity while adrenaline flooded his veins, letting him know with an absolute clarity he was still alive. 

It was March 22, 2016. Only a few short seconds had passed since the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of Brussels. Wells was alive, but his journey beyond this moment had only begun. There were more miracles, more pain, and more danger he had yet to experience. 

The passport scanner wasn't working. 

Biting back building frustration, Elder Mason Wells tried again.  

His companion, Elder Joseph Empey, senior missionary Elder Richard Norby, and Sister Fanny Clain all waited in anticipation. 

Nothing.

The scanner had worked just fine a moment ago when two tourists had mistaken the Elders' white shirts, ties, and name tags to mean they were airport employees and asked for help scanning their own passports. 

Now, with Sister Clain's departure time from the Brussels airport to the U.S. quickly approaching, the scanner wasn't working. 

This time, a real airport employee came to the front of the line and tried. 

Nothing.

Suggesting they try another kiosk, the four missionaries waited three minutes to get to the front of another line.

Still nothing.

Noting their presumed bad luck, the airport employee suggested they explain their technological woes to the attendant at the luggage check-in desk.

With Sister Clain's ticket confirmation in hand, Elder Wells made his way with Elder Empey, Elder Norby, and Sister Clain to the back of the check-in line. 

None of them knew it at the time, but that irritating delay would save their lives.

"That passport [scanner] not working, that five-minute delay that happened to us, that definitely saved us from something much, much, worse," Wells remembers. "I've looked back at the detonation site and undoubtedly we wouldn't be here if it weren't for that."

Unable to brush aside the anxious feeling of falling behind schedule, Elder Wells pulled out his iPad to look at their schedule for the day. It was 7:58 a.m. They would have to catch a train, and it was beginning to look like they might have to ride a later one.

They were in line for less than 30 seconds when a blast lifted Wells off his feet.

"I remember thinking, 'This shouldn't be happening in an airport; why is everything exploding around me?'" Wells says. "My second thought was, 'Wait, this is a bomb.'"

Instinctively, Wells closed his eyes and flames exploded around him, searing his face and right hand with second-degree and third-degree burns. 

Shrapnel burrowed itself into his body, rupturing his Achilles tendon, and slicing his heel, ripping out skin and bone and severing blood vessels.

Less than a second had elapsed, but to Wells, it felt much longer. 

He blinked, watching fire dissipate in front of his body. He was the only one in the airport left standing. His wristwatch was gone, flung somewhere in the debris along with his left shoe. 

It was bright, too bright, and for a moment, the thought flashed through Wells's head that he was dead. "I was expecting at any second to come out of my body and see my body laying there on the ground in the airport," Wells says. But just like a movie scene, the smoke parted, and Wells saw them, the dark figures crumpled on the ground around him. 

It was then that something inside of Wells urged him to move, to get away from this horrific scene. Reorienting himself, he saw light streaming from the airport doors, which had been blown away in the blast.

He took one step and nearly collapsed on the ground.

The brief reprieve from pain was gone. Rapidly firing synapsis from neuron to neuron in Wells's body alerted him that he was, in fact, alive, and something was terribly wrong. Fighting through the pain, Wells took another step on his injured foot, then another step on his right foot, inching with small steps toward the shattered doors.

Surprisingly, he wasn't panicked. In fact, he had felt something most people don't when surviving a terrorist attack—calm. "I was blessed a lot to keep my calm and keep my cool and be able to think clearly," Wells says. "I can say now, and this may sound crazy, but I can say now that March 22 was one of the most peaceful days of my entire life."

In 10 seconds, he somehow managed to trip and stumble across several feet of the floor before a second explosion clashed through the airport, sending him off balance yet again.

Fortunately, Wells was far enough away by that point to spare his body from further shrapnel and he was somehow able to remain on his feet. Dodging hanging ceiling panels, broken metal, and shattered glass, Wells limped outside.

But the danger wasn't over yet. 

More

After surviving three separate terrorist attacks, Mason Wells was left with third-degree burns, emotional scars, and a shaken belief in God. How could a merciful Father let evil prevail? Why had Mason been saved? What did God want from him? This miraculous true story will change how you see your own struggles and teach you the true power of forgiveness, perseverance, and faith.

The skyscrapers were swaying.

Wells looked up from crowds of onlookers making their way to the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon. Having just missed Wells's mother as she ran past their cheering section on the sidelines, Wells and his father were making their way to the finish line to find her. 

But for some reason Wells didn't understand at the time, his dad felt like they should not walk directly to the finish line. 

"He just said, ‘I feel like we should cross here,'" Wells remembers. "I don’t know the reason why he felt like we should go around. Whether he thought it was packed, whether it was just kind of his intuition. He was the one who decided we should cross the street, and had he not, we would’ve been right next to [the bomb] when it went off."

That's when they heard it, the first explosion. 

Confused, Wells looked around. He says it almost sounded like the bleachers on the sideline had collapsed, but he wasn't sure. 

"I turn to my dad, and he didn't know what had happened either," Wells remembers. "There was a guy in front of us that lived in Boston and he said he had never heard that sound in his entire life and right when he said that, the second bomb went off. And that’s kind of when we knew it was something different."

People began to panic, running and shoving as they tried to escape danger even when they didn't know which direction the danger was coming from. 

Wells's father shouted for his son to go to the hotel as they made their way through the chaotic streets. 

After some resistance, Wells complied, somehow making it back to the hotel and up to the room he and his parents were staying in. 

He looked out the large glass windows to the streets below, shocked at what he saw.

From his vantage point, he could clearly see the sites of the two bombs with police vehicles, ambulances, and National Guardsmen pulling up to the bombing sites littered with broken glass and materials from the surrounding buildings. 

A portion of his innocence was shattered as he looked out over the scene of destruction and human suffering. But in some ways, it would also prepare him for his future.

Eventually, Wells turned from the view and turned on the TV to find out more. He was instantly hit with captions like "Boston Marathon Bombing with multiple casualties" and "Terror strikes Boston."

And his parents were still out there, somewhere among all of this. 

Thankfully, after a few tense moments, Wells's phone vibrated with a text message. It was his dad. He had found his mom, they were both safe, and they were making their way back to the hotel. 

He didn't know, he couldn't know, that this wasn't his last brush with a terrorist attack. Someday, he would be one of the survivors of another bombing, waiting for an ambulance. 

His left leg trailing blood, his face and left hand blistered, charred, and scabbed with burns, and his shirt now stained with blood and human tissue that wasn't all his, Wells stepped out onto the cement sidewalk outside the Brussels airport. 

Gripping a steel handrail, Wells looked down. His black dress pants were in tatters from the knee down, exposing something he did not want to see. Part of his left heel was gone. The skin on the right side was gone too, exposing muscle and fascia. Blood was flowing freely from his heel, forming a crimson puddle on the cement.

Wells receiving treatment at a hospital after the bombings

As he stood gingerly on his right leg, clenching the rail, he wondered if he could possibly make it any further. He didn't have much time to think about it before a man stepped toward Wells, urging him to sit down. Wells obliged, lowering himself carefully, painfully, to sit in a pool of his own blood. The man soon left, looking for supplies to help Wells. 

Then the thought came—Elder Empey was still inside the airport. 

Wells began to look through the crowd of people streaming around him, running out of the smoke-filled airport. He noticed Sister Clain, though she didn't see him. She was badly hurt but she was alive, making her way out of the airport and speaking with a badly burned woman. 

All around him, people were screaming, crying, running, or dazed. 

Still no sign of Empey. 

Amid this horrible scene, he noticed someone else, a Muslim woman with a peach shirt and high heels was making her way against the flood of people. 

She approached Wells, her eyes filling with tears as she assessed his injuries. But she remained calm, asking him what he needed, holding his hand, offering him peace even when the world around him was in chaos. 

"Essentially, it was almost as if she was sent from God to keep me calm during all that," Wells reflects. "I just wish I could find her and tell her thank you."

A few minutes later, someone else began making his way toward Wells. It was Elder Empey.

The two inspected each others' injuries: Wells with his bloody heel, charred hand, and burned face and Empey with his burned hands, shrapnel-peppered body, and tatters of skin hanging off his face.

Moments later, the man who originally helped Wells after he exited the airport returned carrying a briefcase. Using the briefcase to elevate Wells's foot, the man turned to Empey and asked him to take his belt off to help form a makeshift tourniquet for Wells's leg—something Wells protested. He knew he was facing a life-altering decision: staunch the blood flow with a tourniquet and risk losing his leg or risk dying from blood loss. 

"When that happened, I remembered back to the promises that God had made me previously in my life," Wells says. "And there were very definite promises that pertained to my life after my mission. So that's why, when I was lying there, I wasn't scared. I wasn't scared of bleeding [to death]. I did my best to respond to my injuries but I kept praying and putting my faith in God that it would work out."

With those promises in mind, Wells made the decision—no tourniquet. 

However, Empey and Wells agreed they needed priesthood blessings. Placing his burned hands over Wells's head, Empey offered a simple blessing. But one phrase stood out to Wells.

"All I remember [is] that he said he promised I would have the life of a 'normal boy,'" Wells says. "As soon as he finished the blessing, the words of Jeffrey R. Holland came to my mind that God keeps all of His promises."

After the blessing, Empey left to find Norby. When he returned, he reported that Elder Norby was alive and people were helping him, but he, too, was severely injured. 

After that, Empey and Wells waited on the sidewalk. An EMT passed Wells. He stopped long enough to press a wad of gauze into his hand, then hurried on to attend to others whose injuries were more severe. Wells, with his foot elevated on the suitcase, had Empey press the wad into the bloody hole where part of his heel had been. 

Finally, emergency personnel loaded Wells into an ambulance filled with other victims screaming in pain. But Wells was in an ambulance. He was safe. Tears wetted Wells's eyes. 

But the horrors of the day were not over.

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After surviving three separate terrorist attacks, Mason Wells was left with third-degree burns, emotional scars, and a shaken belief in God. How could a merciful Father let evil prevail? Why had Mason been saved? What did God want from him? This miraculous true story will change how you see your own struggles and teach you the true power of forgiveness, perseverance, and faith.

Before he was taken to the hospital, Wells was transported to the airport fire station less than 50 yards from where the bombs were detonated. 

After arriving, emergency personnel moved Wells into the building and situated him on a cot. Wells looked around the station; there were about 50 or so other wounded bombing survivors in the station. The garage of the station was empty; all the fire trucks were on the road. He settled in and waited for EMTs to see to his injuries before he was transported to a hospital.

He was at the station less than 10 minutes when he heard the first shots. 

Wells watched as a mass of people, including the EMTs seeing to Wells and the other wounded, ran past with their heads down to avoid stray bullets. 

From the shouts, Wells learned a man with a gun was shooting people near the fire station garage. 

Some of the wounded tried to escape, but with a ruptured Achilles tendon and a partially shattered heel, Wells knew he wouldn't make it far. 

Instead, he grabbed the blanket the man in the cot next to him had left as he crawled away and tried to cover himself, lying motionless in an attempt to hide from the shooter. 

All the while, Wells prayed. 

Then he heard more gunshots. 

People stopped running. 

Slowly the EMTs made it back into the garage. 

He learned from the medics who began treating his wounds that a man began shooting people nearby, but thankfully had been stopped. 

Eventually, Wells was loaded into an ambulance once again. This time, he was heading to a hospital.

For 36 hours after arriving at the hospital in Aalst, Belgium, Wells vacillated between consciousness and unconsciousness. 

Surgeons had managed to save his right hand and left foot, but he would have to be transferred to another hospital in Ghent for burn treatment.  

Mason with his dad at a hospital in Ghent, Belgium

With no TV, phone, or other welcome distractions, Wells's stay in Ghent provided him with ample time to stare at the wall and reflect on the horrific scenes he had just been a part of. 

It "wasn't the best thing" Wells admits, to have so much time to think about such a traumatic experience. And when he thought about what those men, those terrorists had taken from him —his mission, his flesh, his bone, his blood, and a portion of his mental health—Wells admits that, at times, he felt angry at these men for what they had done to him, to Empey, to Clain, to Norby, and to so many others. 

But those moments were fleeting. He had already made the decision to forgive those men while he sat in a puddle of his own blood outside the Brussels airport. He had prayed for those men even when he felt the pain of what they had done to him. And from that moment, from that day on, he decided to put aside the feelings of hate and move forward with his life. 

"When it comes to our lives, if we're going to let something affect [us] for the worst, if we are going to chose to let something dwell in our minds and in our hearts, if we are going to choose to let anger and frustration and emotion sit in our hearts that shouldn't be there, that's not good. That's on us," Wells says. 

Five days after the bombing, Wells's doctor began prepping him for a surgery to rid his right hand of burned skin and tissue. 

Unfortunately, this involved sticking a catheter in his right armpit to help numb his hand. With the help of a very large needle, the nurses at the hospital inserted the tube in Wells's armpit.

It was extremely painful.

And it didn't work.

After several more painful pokes with the needle in an attempt to get the tube in the right place, his doctor presented him with two choices: go ahead with the surgery without local anesthetic or risk permanently damaging his hand by waiting. 

Remembering the promise that he would be a "normal boy" from Elder Empey, Wells agreed to the surgery without local anesthetic. 

Less than a minute into the excruciating 30-minute procedure, doctors could tell Wells was almost in too much pain to continue. One doctor, who was only observing the surgery, sat next to Wells and offered to hold his left hand. Wells agreed, and the doctor began asking him questions to take Wells's mind off the pain. 

Between Wells's screams, the doctor learned Wells was a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a brief missionary discussion ensued.

"If you take away that fact that I was in complete pain and my flesh was being scraped off my hand, it was a great discussion," Wells says. "We made a lot of progress. There were a lot of questions asked. I had some responses. I was able to teach him about the entire plan of salvation. It was fantastic. I do remember thinking, 'Wow, I never thought I would be teaching someone about the plan of salvation in a situation like this,' but I did."

After those painful 30 minutes of scraping flesh, Wells returned to his hospital room. But there were still other moments of pain and agony Wells would have to face. 

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After surviving three separate terrorist attacks, Mason Wells was left with third-degree burns, emotional scars, and a shaken belief in God. How could a merciful Father let evil prevail? Why had Mason been saved? What did God want from him? This miraculous true story will change how you see your own struggles and teach you the true power of forgiveness, perseverance, and faith.

When Wells first called his parents after his first surgery in Brussels, he told them he would probably be in the hospital for a few weeks. Though his hospital stay in Brussels was relatively short, he still had a long, difficult journey to recovery ahead. 

Nine days after the bombings, Wells was in an airport again, this time with his parents to catch a plane to Salt Lake City, Utah.

Though he returned to the States and was growing accustomed to hearing English once again, Wells still had to face the reality of his injuries. He spent weeks being poked and prodded by doctors as they did the best they could to help Wells heal physically. Seven surgeries, 300 stitches, 200 staples, and many painful physical therapy sessions later, Wells finally left the hospital in Salt Lake. It had been a total of seven weeks since the bombings.

Recovering at home was frustratingly slow. Three months after the bombings, Wells was still struggling to walk on his injured left foot. 

"There were lots of times when I was really frustrated, when I got really irritated," he says. "It took a long time for me to walk normally again. It took a really long time for my hand to close up. It took another six, seven months for my heel to even close up. So I dealt with a lot of frustration."

One day, his frustration boiled over. After three months of trying to put weight on his foot and three months of immense pain, he had nothing to show for it. Wasn't he supposed to be a "normal boy" again? Like so many times before, Wells dropped to his knees and offered a prayer, pleading for help. Like so many times before, he received a feeling of peace, that God had not forgotten His promises, but Wells had to do his part. 

Determination renewed, Wells began the tedious, repetitious process that would lead to his full recovery. 

"I just remember taking one step after another, one step after another, just repeating that process," Wells says. "By repeating that process over and over again, things started to change."

Slowly, step by agonizing step, Wells started walking again. Eventually, he was even running 50 yards from his house to his mailbox—a miracle considering just months before he had been sitting on the sidewalk outside the Brussels airport making the decision to avoid the tourniquet that might have prevented him from running at all.

Wells saw God fulfilling His promises on that day as well. Through all the horror, the pain, and the frustration Wells experienced, God was there, fulfilling the promise that Wells would be a "normal boy" again. 

More than a year and a half after the bombings, Wells is moving forward. In December 2016, he began taking classes at the University of Utah, and 10 months after the bombing, he fulfilled his lifelong dream of entering the U.S. Naval Academy.

When he looks at his right hand, his left heel, and the skin grafts, he still sees the physical reminders of March 22. But he doesn't regret what he sees. 

"Every time I see them [the scars], they are a reminder that God preserved my life," he says. "That He put angels between me and the bomb to save my life. And I think I have a slightly better idea of why Christ chose to keep the marks in His hands and His feet. It's because He literally cannot forget us. He sees us every day. And anytime I'm having a bad day, all I have to do is look down at my hand and realize I'm still here. That God has given me more blessings than I've ever known what to do with it."

He says he can't be angry with what happened to him because he's felt God's help throughout his recovery. Even before the first bomb went off on March 22, He says there were angels in that airport to attend to him, Sister Clain, Elder Empey, and Elder Norby that day. And even though he's struggled mentally and physically since that day, he says he's made up his mind about how he is going to live his life moving forward. 

"Ultimately, we know that we are going to face adversity and we are going to face challenges while on earth," Wells says, "But when it comes to all the adversity that we face, the choice is ours as to whether it's going to better our lives or make our lives for the worst. . . .  I had a very clear decision that day to either build myself up or tear myself down while I was at that airport. I had a clear decision every day at that recovery center. The choice has always been mine and always will be whether I will build myself up or tear myself down. Whether I want to give into to anger or hatred or whether I want to choose to live a higher road. Whether I want to choose something better."

He says the way he chooses to live for something better is to learn from his experiences; to learn from the Brussels bombings and move forward with his life; to forgive the men who hurt him and so many others that day. 

There are a lot of options in front of him as to how he will live his life after the bombings. For now, Wells still plans on pursuing a career in the military and hopes to continue serving those around him. He says he just wants to live "the kind of life God wants me to live."

"Going through this was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life," Wells says. "And coming out of it and trying to get myself back to where I was, that's been the hardest thing, but it has happened over time. And I can definitely say that God has fulfilled His promise that I would return to my life as a "normal boy," I've been able to live the kind of life that I've wanted to live."

All images courtesy of Jennifer Smith

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After surviving three separate terrorist attacks, Mason Wells was left with third-degree burns, emotional scars, and a shaken belief in God. How could a merciful Father let evil prevail? Why had Mason been saved? What did God want from him? This miraculous true story will change how you see your own struggles and teach you the true power of forgiveness, perseverance, and faith.