When the people left to grieve after Lockerbie remember, it’s always around the void and vacuum of what never got to occur.
Harry Bainbridge, who grew up in Fairmont and crisscrossed the globe as an attorney doing international business, never got to witness the birth of his son.
LaWanda Thomas, stationed with the U.S. Air Force in then-West Germany, never got to introduce her 2-month-old son, Jonathan Ryan, sitting on his mom’s lap, to his grandparents in Southland, Mich.
Lynne Hartunian a college student from Niskayuna, N.Y., majoring in communications, never to got to give that bottle of French wine – actually purchased in France – to her folks for Christmas. She was coming home from Europe after her time in a study abroad program.
Scott Cory, of Old Lyme, Conn., also an American college student overseas, never got to tell his old high school soccer buddies about all those pick-up games in London’s Hyde Park – which is what he was doing in the hours before he got on the plane.
Valerie Canady, an accountant working at her Pittsburgh firm’s London offices, never got to tell her parents in Morgantown she was engaged.
Lockerbie.
That’s the grim, one-word shorthand assigned to what happened.
Pan Am Flight 103 had just gone wheels up from London to the U.S., when it exploded over the skies of Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988.
The above six, plus 253 more, the entire manifest, perished after a bomb smuggled into the luggage compartment was detonated.
Flight 103 was arcing at 30,000 feet over the tiny, picturesque town in Dumfries and Galloway when the fireball roiled through the pressurized cabin.
Twisted metal and whole sections of the ruined craft rained down, killing another 11 Lockerbie residents, who, as the fates would have it, were simply in the path of it all.
Thirty-five of the 190 American passengers on the flight were college students, flying home for Christmas – many in the heady rush of crossing an ocean from the air, one distant shore and back again, for the first time.
Little Jonathan Ryan never had a chance to get started.
Out of the wreckage
The investigation that has never stopped, still got a new start and a new blip on its radar over the weekend, when U.S. authorities took Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, a Libyan and the alleged bomb-maker, into custody.
While two other Libyan intelligence officials have been charged in the U.S. for their alleged involvement in the attack – neither, to date, have appeared in an American court room for prosecution.
Meanwhile. Mas’ud was expected to face charges for the act in a District of Columbia court room Monday afternoon.
Which may, or may not, be the end pages to the chapter, and the whole book of the tragedy, that left mourners from the Philippines to Fairborn, Ohio.
For 34 years, families, in their grief, still sought to assign meaning to lives stolen away, in a quest that was urgent and poignant, all at once.
Especially since it began looking as if no resolution would ever come.
In Morgantown, Loulie Canady never got to watch her daughter and only child walk down the aisle, and she never got to experience grandchildren.
She and her late husband, Bill, however did establish a foundation and arts program in her honor at her alma mater of WVU, in hopes their daughter’s name, and her love of music and theater, would endure.
“We just had to have something beautiful come out of something so horrible,” Mrs. Canady told The Dominion Post previously. She wasn’t immediately available for comment for this story.
Justice cleared for takeoff?
In Coral Gables, Fla., Victoria Cummock got to do something she wasn’t sure would happen.
She got to make an official statement, championing the official first steps in legal retribution for an act that killed 270 people on Dec. 21, 1988, including her husband.
Like Valerie Canady, John Cummock was an executive doing business in England for his firm.
He originally had a later flight, but he was able to get a seat on 103. He wanted to be home a day early to help with Christmas decorating and their daughter’s 3rd birthday celebration, his wife said.
His widow established the nonprofit Pan Am 103 Lockerbie Legacy Foundation in honor of the victims and in solidarity for their families.
It’s also a watchdog group for the Lockerbie investigation, its founder said, while eyeing other airborne attacks targeting Americans and others, including Sept. 11.
Visit https://www.pa103ll.org/ to learn more.
Victoria Cummock was both optimistic and pragmatic in her statement to media outlets Monday.
“Hopefully, this significant first step will begin to address the three decades-long-plus miscarriage of justice,” she said.
“Our wish is for criminal trial proceedings to begin immediately,” she continued.
“The victims’ families are keenly aware that after 34 years, informants and witnesses die, memories fade and evidence can deteriorate or disappear.”
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