A brother and sister from Massachusetts were among those who survived the terror attacks at the Brussels airport.
The young woman sat down with FOX25's Jacqui Heinrich, less than 24 hours after getting off the plane home at Logan.
She said she is still coming to grips with what she witnessed, but the one thing that sticks out in her mind is the kindness of strangers amid the chaos.
"The security guard told us that we needed to evacuate immediately and drop all our luggage and leave it behind. That’s when we knew something was really happening,” 20-year-old Mariah Boisvert said.
Boisvert said it was more than an hour before she and her brother realized what had happened in the terminal down the hall from hers when she overheard a flight attendant speaking French say the word “explosion.”
"Some people’s phones were working but ours [mostly] weren’t. We didn’t have Internet, but some people found out that there was a bombing and this was, we were in a dangerous circumstance,” she said.
Herded from terminal to terminal through shuttle buses amid the chaos, she and her brother relied on each other for strength
"We were on a survival mission really, we didn’t have time to think,” she said.
But they did think to call their parents with the news that they were OK.
"We obviously had no control over where they were and it was a very, very tense 24 hours for sure. We prayed,” their mother, Maribeth Lynch, said.
As what she witnessed sinks in, Boisvert said thinks back to the kindness of strangers helping each other through those moments -- a woman she'd never met handing her clothes, since she was in shorts and a T-shirt.
"This is actually hers since I have no clothes with me, I lost all my luggage,” Boisvert said.
She said while she witnessed evil, what she experienced was the goodness of humanity.
"We can’t let something like this hold us back. We just can’t," she said.
The family will reunite on Easter Sunday.
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