New York - Vendors count blessings in Times Square after car-bombing attempt

New York - To stand at the corner of W. 45th St. and Broadway exactly one week after Faisal Shahzad drove up with his car bomb was to stand among uncommonly decent people who surely would have been killed had he not been as dumb as he is dangerous.

Just a step from where the car had been parked was a noble soul who has sought no publicity for what he clearly figures was simply doing his job as part of a team.

Police Officer Jason Mandra was standing right next to the Pathfinder when the device ignited with a pop that Shahzad hoped would be an explosion and a fireball. Mandra would have left a pregnant wife and a 4-year-old daughter.

Other cops sing the praises of Mandra and his partner, Police Officer Donny Schroeder, for how quickly they cleared the street.

Mandra is not one to seek publicity, and he seemed happy enough to be on post, still simply doing his job at 6:28 p.m. Saturday as one of the hero vendors sat nearby, autographing T-shirts for admirers.

"Excuse me, who's that?" a tourist asked.

"That's Lance," somebody said.

"Lance who?" the tourist asked.

Lance Horton looked up in mid-autograph.

"'Lance who?' You been on another planet?" Horton asked.

Horton's likeness had flashed around this planet as one of the two vendors who had sounded the alarm on seeing smoke coming from the Pathfinder. The other hero vendor, Duane Jackson, who works across the street, was also being treated as a kind of celebrity.

"Are you the man?" a tourist asked Saturday.

"One of them," Jackson said.

"Let me shake your hand!" the tourist exclaimed.

A Florida couple, Jim and Maureen Ladd, had a passerby snap an iPhone photo of them with the hero.

"We're going to send this to our son," the wife said.

A third vendor, Alouine Niass, was saying that he was in fact the first to sound the alarm. Horton allows he did hear Niass call out at about the same time.

Horton also says that since he has difficulty walking, a man who works for him named Wayne (Bullet) Robertson was the one who ran over to the mounted cop, who then put out the call for the car fire.

Whatever exactly happened, Horton and the others who had been on the corner at the fateful moment a week before understood what their fate would have been had the bomb detonated as Shahzad intended.

"We would have been evaporated," Horton said. "There wouldn't have even been pieces."

He looked over at Mandra, whose pregnant wife would have had as bad a Mother's Day as anybody can.

On the other side of W. 45th St., someone else who surely would have been in the kill zone had just given his mom an early Mother's Day present by calling her back home in Morocco.

Hamid Boudali works at a hot dog cart that was directly across from the car bomb. His mother, Salima Khiyar, had seen TV news coverage of the attack and recognized the corner from images Boudali had sent her from a laptop Webcam. She had been in a panic when she finally reached him by phone last Sunday.

"She say, 'I feel blind when I saw the news,'" Boudali recalled.

Boudali bought a phone card, and paused to call her as he pushed the cart up to the corner Saturday.

"My mother say, 'When I hear your voice, it's better than medicine,'" Boudali said.

Boudali was back at work now along with the cart's owner, Rallis Gialaboukis. A man stopped to ask where he could buy a lottery ticket, but Boudali was unable to say exactly where.

"I like to earn my money," Boudali said after the man left.

Boudali understood that he and everybody else who had been around that bomb had won another kind of jackpot.

"That's big luck," Boudali said. "That's bigger than Lotto."

Whatever the particulars of exactly who did what, the reward for everybody who works on that corner and all those who were passing by at 6:30 p.m. on May 1 is that it was not their last moment.

A week later, they were still gloriously alive. Mandra would be going home to his pregnant wife. And Boudali's mom had received the most wonderful of early Mother's Day presents.

"She's happy now," Boudali said. "She says, 'I pray for everybody on the corner.'"

Daily News