Mason Wells, Utah teen injured in Brussels attack, was also at Boston Marathon bombing

A Utah teenager who was injured in the explosion at the Brussels airport on Tuesday survived a similar terrorist attack three years ago at the Boston Marathon. He was also two hours away in France when the Paris attacks occurred last year.

Mason Wells, 19, was one of three Mormon missionaries from Utah who were injured in the attack at the airport. He was left with a surgery scar, a severed Achilles tendon, a head gash, shrapnel injures and severe burns, The Associated Press reported.

Incredibly, this is not the first time Mr. Wells has experienced terrorism firsthand.

He was standing with his father near the finish line of the Boston Marathon and felt the ground shake when a pressure cooker bomb exploded a block away from where they were watching his mother run in the race.

“Hopefully, he’s run his lifelong odds and we’re done,” said his father, Chad Wells, AP reported.

“I think it will make him a stronger person. … Maybe the Boston experience was there to help him get through this experience,” he said.

Mason Wells was also traveling in France, though not in Paris, in November when jihadists launched a series of gun and bomb attacks in the city, CBS reported. The Boston Globe said he was two hours from Paris when the attacks happened.

In Brussels on Monday, he was standing just a few feet away from the bomb that exploded at the airport. The blasts in the Belgian capital killed 34 people and wounded hundreds more at the airport and a subway station.

Mr. Wells had four months left on his two-year Mormon mission and was planning to major in engineering at the University of Utah next fall, AP said.

He also had plans to reapply to the U.S. Naval Academy after barely missing the admissions cut after high school, his father said.

Two more Mormons from Utah, Richard Norby and Joseph Empey, were also injured in airport attack.

The State Department said it does not know of any Americans killed in the Brussels attack but several Americans are still unaccounted for, including a brother and sister from New York.