December 21, 1988
Lockerbie
A transatlantic flight over a Scottish town, three minutes past seven
A bomb in a radio-cassette player in the forward cargo hold went off at thirty-one thousand feet, seven days before Christmas.
The aircraft came apart in the air. The nose section fell three miles east of the town. A wing section with the fuel in it came down on Sherwood Crescent and took out several houses and their families.
All two hundred and fifty-nine aboard were killed and eleven people on the ground. Thirty-five were students from Syracuse University flying home for Christmas.
The people of Lockerbie, a town of four thousand, washed and pressed the clothing recovered from the hillsides and returned it to the families. Many of those families came back for years afterwards and were put up in local houses.