In First Person: Remembering the Lives Lost in Pam Am Flight 103

ABC News on Campus reporter Michelle San Miguel blogs: I never met Thomas Britton Schultz.  And yet I stood before a crowd of hundreds to tell them about a man whose life – until a few months ago – was unknown to me.  I told them about Scultz’s love for London, where he studied abroad the fall of 1988 because he believed it was the land where history was made.  I told them about Schultz’s career ambitions.  He was a student at Ohio Wesleyan University, who aspired to be a lawyer and had plans to work on Capitol Hill the summer after returning to the states.  The crowd that gathered before the Wall of Remembrance on the Syracuse University campus was there to pay tribute to people like Schultz, who was one of the 270 victims who died in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on December 21, 1988.  The aircraft was destroyed by a bomb, leaving pieces of the plane scattered over Lockerbie, Scotland.  Aboard the flight was Schultz and 34 other students who were studying abroad with Syracuse University.  Nearly 21 years have passed since 270 lives were lost in what was arguably, at the time, one of the deadliest terrorist attacks against the United States.  But Syracuse University continues to remember the event. Every year, Syracuse University selects 35 students to be remembrance scholars.  These scholars are responsible for planning events for Remembrance Week, the week in which the university commemorates the victims who died in the bombing.  Each scholar is assigned a victim to remember.  I was responsible for remembering the life of Thomas Schultz.  To better understand who Schultz was, I went over to the university’s archives where I found several files with information on him.  As I looked through each document in the file, I felt like an interloper, meticulously reading about a man whose death had connected me with his life.  I was left in tears when I encountered an article that mentioned that Thomas’s brother, Andrew, had died in 1978.  Thomas and Andrew’s parents had lost both of their children.  Clearly, I had a big responsibility to fill.  I had to make people aware of this man.  This year was a historic time to be a Remembrance Scholar.  Most of the scholars, including myself, were born the year of this tragedy.  While we were too young to remember the day of the bombing, we were alive when it happened.  For every subsequent group of scholars, the bombing will be a chapter in history. The only person convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 was released this year.  On Aug. 20, 2009 the Scottish government released Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds because medical evidence showed he was going to die of prostate cancer within months.  Remembrance Week concludes with a rose laying ceremony, a time for the scholars to pay tribute to the victims. We spoke to the crowd about our respective victims and laid down a rose in memory of him or her.  I had the honor of giving the opening remarks at the ceremony (seen above).  As I made my way to the front of the crowd to give the address, I knew there was an assortment of people in the crowd.  Among me were dozens of students, professors who once taught these students, and several relatives and friends of the victims.  I am not afraid of public speaking, and yet I was nervous to give this address.  The sense of responsibility made me anxious.  I walked to the front of the crowd, waited for the trumpeters to finish playing “Amazing Grace,” and began my welcoming address.  I reminded the crowd why it is important to remember these victims — lives were cut short, dreams were never realized, and friends and family lost a loved one. Since delivering my address, some critics questioned the passion that my fellow scholars and I have about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 when so many of us were born that year.  I have heard people wonder just how much of a connection each one of us could feel with someone we never met.  You need not have met these victims to feel a sense of responsibility to keep their memory alive.  You need only to be a compassionate human being who wants to educate others about an act of terrorism and those who were victims of it, with the hopes that education will lead to peace.