Editor’s note: This week marks SU’s annual Remembrance Week, during which the campus comes together to remember the victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.

When Pan Am Flight 103 was reduced to wreckage and rubble on Dec. 21, 1988, a pall was cast on members of the Syracuse University community, near and far.

A bomb went off aboard the plane and killed 16 crew members and all 243 passengers, including 35 students returning from semesters in London and Florence, Italy, through SU’s study abroad program. Falling debris also claimed 11 lives in Lockerbie, Scotland, when large sections of the plane fell crashing to the ground.

The workday was wrapping up at Cas Marino’s advertising agency in Manhattan. He stepped into the lobby and glanced at the television airing news reports of a plane crash. Coverage of the disaster was too premature for Marino, who graduated from SU the semester before, to realize how close to home the tragedy hit. He left for drinks with a co-worker that evening, just as information surrounding the crash began to surface.

As Marino sat in the bar, TV screens flashed with new details and the situation grew direr. Everybody on board perished, news reports confirmed. Authorities suspected a terrorist plot.

Feelings of dread began to creep up as Marino thought of his friends who spent the semester studying abroad in regions across Europe and likely booked flights home for the holidays around that time.

‘I was getting very, very tense,’ he said.

On edge, Marino rode the Express Bus to meet his awaiting fiancee, a then-SU undergraduate who already left campus for Winter Break, at his parents’ home for dinner.

The door burst open just as Marino neared the doorway; his mother and fiancee stared back at him. Marino’s fiancee delivered the word — Rick Monetti, a close friend and a fraternity brother Marino helped initiate the year before, died in the bombing.

Marino buckled, nearly fainting at the news, as his fiancee and mother braced him. He spent the night consuming media coverage and waiting by the phone, Valium and a bottle of scotch by his side.

As Marino grieved in the comfort of family, some of those left on SU’s campus gathered at a service in Hendricks Chapel. Within a matter of hours, John Spadafora, a senior communications and marketing student, went from studying for final exams in his Alpha Tau Omega bedroom to mourning the death of friends in Hendricks.

Spadafora, one of Monetti’s fraternity brothers, also developed a close bond with Amy Shapiro, a senior photojournalism student. The two were floormates freshman year, and Spadafora said he considered going abroad with Shapiro but elected to remain on campus for the sports scene.

On the night of the bombing, the university proceeded with a basketball game at the Carrier Dome. That was the only game Spadafora said he missed all season.

Spadafora went home a couple of days later. Although removed from campus, the grief was still raw, as friends from home asked questions and friends from SU remained in contact.

‘Even though you were off campus, you really couldn’t get away from it,’ he said.

More than 20 years later, whenever Spadafora leaves for business trips and sets foot in the airport those on the ill-fated flight traveled through, he recalls memories of Shapiro and Monetti sharply in his mind.

‘I’m always going to think about Rick and Amy when I’m in the U.K.,’ he said.

Thousands of miles away in London, Malcolm Ingram was struck powerless by the words that were relayed to him through the phone as he sat in his sister’s kitchen in the West Country.

Ingram, an associate professor in the drama department, just capped off teaching a semester in London with some of the students who perished on the flight.

Students studying in London each wrote essays during their time abroad, Ingram said.

‘It’s really hard to read them because they’re so full of energy and promise,’ he said. ‘It’s tough.’

Seeing the lives of these ‘vivid human beings’ with untold potential extinguished made Ingram aware of life and death from a different vantage point, he said.

‘Me, you, anybody could just disappear at any moment,’ Ingram said, adding that life becomes more precious for those who live with the memory of those lost.

Ingram returned to the SU campus to teach the following semester, and though the administration offered space and resources for the grieving, the disaster ‘permeated everything.’

That semester, Ingram often acted as an emotional crutch for the three students who studied abroad with their classmates, but were not on Pan Am Flight 103. The experience was exhausting and emotionally painful, but Ingram said he appreciated the opportunity to foster a deeper relationship with the students.

‘I found it kind of liberating in a sort of weird type of way,’ he said. ‘You could get a little bit closer to somebody.’

Upon the return from Winter Break, a larger memorial service was held in the Carrier Dome, where members of the SU campus shared in their collective grief.

The Syracuse Symphony Orchestra played, the victims’ families were in attendance, as were the study abroad students who booked different flights home, said Joan Deppa, associate professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

If any bright spot can be learned from the tragedy, Deppa said she believes the university grew into more than an institution of higher learning — it became a university that cared deeply for the students left behind.

‘Our mission is educating young people. And here was this whole group of young people that we had been educating, that was just snatched right away from us,’ she said. ‘That makes you pay attention to the ones that are left behind.’

dbtruong@syr.edu

Published on November 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Debbie: dbtruong@syr.edu | @debbietruong