The 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killed 270 innocent people and began the new age of terr | dG1fZkVGa2tEaWZWaXM
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Short filmTranscript
00:00It was total disbelief. This is not happening to Lockerbie.
00:07There's an engine lying in the farm. There's a house devastated up there.
00:14There was debris falling everywhere and I thought the whole roof was going to cave in on us at the time.
00:19It shattered into a million pieces, spread over ten square miles of countryside.
00:24It's been 30 years since the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.
00:33The plane was headed toward New York.
00:3635 students studying abroad with Syracuse University were killed in this terrorist attack.
00:41Large sections of the airplane crashed onto residential areas of Lockerbie,
00:46killing 11 people on the ground, right before Christmas on December 21, 1988.
00:52It was total disbelief. This is not happening to Lockerbie.
00:56This is the town where nothing ever happens. Well, 21st of December it happened.
01:02I pulled the door open and I could see an immense fireball going perhaps a quarter of a mile into the sky.
01:10As I watched the fireball collapse, I could see various objects falling down within it.
01:17The strongest memory I have of that day and the following days at Lockerbie was the smell of aviation fuel in the air.
01:25It never leaves me when I drive through Lockerbie. That's the thing that still comes back to me.
01:31SU professor Lawrence Mason taught several students who were lost in the attacks.
01:36I knew I had to have taught some of them. We didn't know names,
01:42but I was pretty sure, given my teaching record, that I knew some of them.
01:48There was a radio communication that said that they had found some pan-arm literature on the ground
01:55suggesting it was a Boeing 747 heading for New York that had crashed.
02:00When Lawrence Mason heard the news of the bombing, he had an assignment to shoot an SU basketball game in the Carrier Dome.
02:06He remembers the crowd's somber atmosphere that night.
02:10My boss at UPI said, we'll see if you can make a picture at the Carrier Dome
02:15that conveys something of the mood on Syracuse University campus.
02:20Nobody made a better picture about the grief than that night.
02:26It was so raw, and it was so heartfelt, and it was so unplanned,
02:33and just a beautiful moment between these two young women. We all felt the same way.
02:39The Syracuse community has united to remember the victims lost every year since 1988.
02:45A powerful display in the university quad shows exactly where the students were seated on the plane.
02:51In their own small ways, the people of Syracuse and Lockerbie have pieced together memories of those lost
02:58to unite and to heal together.