Remembering TWA Flight 800: Long Islanders recall the tragedy 30 years later

"I was actually in Germany, helping my sisters take care of our dad who had Parkinson’s at its last stages. I received the phone call at 3:30 in the morning from a friend of my son. They were still in total disbelief but they called me. They said something happened to Ollie, and I said, ‘Was he out riding his motorcycle?’ He had a pilot friend who flew aerobatics; I screamed into the phone, 'Was this guy trying to teach him?' I remember yelling into the phone, 'What in the world could ever happen to Ollie at TWA?' They brought him home and we buried him here at our church near his schoolyard where he used to play soccer. I still tend his grave all the time when I go for my evening drive and tell him, 'Mom is OK, Mom just checks on you.’ Had he returned from this, he was set to go for training with the Air National Guard and then return with seniority to the airline and be an F-15 fighter pilot. He was one of those that when 'Top Gun' came out, that was his ultimate dream."

"I have only missed the annual service at Smith Point one time due to illness and one time during COVID. Those who come, we all come for the same reason: We know that’s where our loved ones took their last breath and we want to gather to honor their sacrifice. For me, that’s the only place I want to be that night."

"I had two hats on that night. I am one of the members of the Critical Incident Stress Management team in Suffolk County. My job was keeping an eye on the Coast Guard, who were bringing bodies off the boats, making sure their mental health was holding up. We had some deep concerns about the civilians that were coming in bringing bodies. Everybody saw stuff. There was an EMT I talked with, she was sitting on the stretcher, just sitting at the water without moving her eyes. She was really traumatized."

"When I wasn’t making sure people were OK, the other hat I wore was that of pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in East Moriches. We were blessing the bodies as they came in. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a Coastie carrying a girl in his arms."

"Our church was open to recovery workers who needed to get away from the scene for about three months. It was a time of really supporting the people that were doing the job. The churches and the community members at large were really involved. It showed the resilience of the human spirit. Once we got through the initial shock, so many people came together."

"I saw an orange flash in the sky. It was just getting to dusk. I was in my car, heading home. We saw that orange trail in the sky. It landed in the Moriches area, but it started before that. There were a lot of rumors going around at the time, but my first instinct was that it was a terrorist act, like when you think about [the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over] Lockerbie in Scotland. It affected people in this community very deeply. That was a really difficult time. A lot of anger, a lot of pain, a lot of suffering. I had friends, people in this community, who had family on that plane. They organized a memorial service and they were instrumental in helping to get the memorial built over at Smith Point. It’s a tremendous memorial, and they were instrumental in raising the funds and helping to design the memorial depicting the loss sustained by their families. I love the fact that it identifies all the victims from the different nations. To me, that is befitting of the unity of the world. Every time I go there, I stop by and just take a look. Never forget that all of us are subject to tragedy. I think our community recognizes that."

"My brother called me and said Virginia was on the airplane. I said to myself, ‘They’re going to be alive because Virginia loves the water.’ Eric was found the next day, and Virginia was found 10 days later. Honestly, I thought I was going to lose my sister [Virginia’s mother]. She heard the news and for a second, she lost her voice because of the way she screamed. They were a wonderful couple. They were going for a wedding. Eric the day before had a surgery. He was a dentist. He told Virginia, ‘Go with my parents and I’ll go the next day.’ Virginia said, ‘No, I’ll wait for you, we’ll go together.’ And that’s what happened. There’s not a day where we don’t talk about Virginia and Eric. It’s very sad that they left us too soon at their age."

“That night I drove to the dock at the end of Union Avenue in Center Moriches, and you saw a lot of suitcases and a lot of belongings of the passengers. You're looking at all these boats, all these people are dumbfounded, wide-eyed, wondering if they're going to rescue anybody. Then I went to the Red Cross and I volunteered. It was local, I just thought it was something where I could be of help. We were distributing food. It was awfully somber. I’m quite sure there was speculation all over the place. I remember walking in, I don’t know if they were working for the government or not, but a person told me ‘we’re never going to know what happened.’ All of Long Island was affected. That was a major tragedy. I never flew again after that.”

"At the Coast Guard station, there was a Roman Catholic priest, myself and a Hasidic rabbi, praying as the fishermen in rowboats and very small boats and Coast Guard boats were bringing in bodies and pieces of bodies. It was a horrible thing. The three of us were maybe 20 yards from the edge of the dock as they were unloading these into body bags to go to the medical examiner’s office in Suffolk County."

"As the days went by, just about every group was taken care of except for the first responders, folks from the medical examiners office, staff from the local hospitals, so we put together a service at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Park in East Moriches. Hundreds of people were there."

"John Fleischmann was kind of the dean of the clergy contingent. He’s also a paramedic. He got us clergy all together to debrief, kind of a crisis counseling kind of thing. Some of us said, ‘We’re fine, we’re fine.’ We weren’t fine."

"My mom, Jo-Anne Griffith, was a TWA flight attendant. I thought for years she was working on the flight, but she was going to Paris to cover a shift that was on a different flight for a friend. It was only within the last few years that I spoke to one of her close friends who told me this story. At first, hearing the actual story was shocking, but in a way it’s actually kind of helped me accept that it was just fate."

"I remember processing it through my dad's lens. For me, the whole time, it was almost as if I was observing a movie. I didn’t cry. It was very much like one day she was here, one day she wasn’t. It was like she poofed into thin air and I accepted it. I was even confused why the adults were so upset and crying. I think it came out later when I was a teenager. My grandma passed when I was 14. Both my grandparents were buried in the same plot as my mom. That’s when my grief and emotions came out in full. As a kid, it was just like I was observing. It was very surreal."

"A tragedy creates a sense of trauma. Luckily in my family, it brought us together, but I think that you also can kind of isolate. It’s not sad to bring her up. We’re always happy to talk about her and her memories. I have conversations with her friends and I’m constantly learning new information about her."

"It’s really made me appreciate everyday, not taking people for granted that I love. Obviously losing a parent in a sudden way creates a fear of abandonment. That was something that we all had to work through, and we all have. The way we see life is very different. We don’t take things for granted."

"I pulled into my driveway and my daughter came flying out of the house, saying, ‘There’s been a plane crash, you’ve got to call your office.’ I turned the car around and drove to Hampton Bays and met John Williams, the photographer, and went out on this guy’s boat."

"It was a beautiful night, one of those nights where the sea was unbelievably flat, the sky was absolutely clear. As we got closer and closer, you could see jet fuel burning. We got into the mess of luggage, seat cushions and all kinds of stuff in the water. I phoned in a story from the boat as to what we were seeing."

"One of the first things I saw was an empty baby bottle. All the fishing boats, you could see them pulling stuff up out of the water like luggage, parts of the plane. I’m sure there were bodies being pulled up under the decks of boats, but it was dark enough that we didn’t really see that. We stayed till about sunup."

"I think 30 years later, Long Island needs to remember all the families that lost loved ones. The lesson of this is that families that suffer this kind of a horror story need to be remembered. Our job was to tell the public as best we could what we saw. Then beyond that, our job is to help these families never be forgotten."

"My job was to support the incident commander by identifying EMS resources that were available, figuring out where to stage them, and what equipment they may need. In a mass casualty incident, there’s a treatment area, a triage area, a transportation area. There’s a morgue if that is the case, and that was the case."

"We started to see a number of private boats that were out on the water coming in with victims. We would hear reports on the radio: ‘We have a survivor,’ 'No, it’s not a survivor,’ ‘We just found another one.’ It was an emotional roller-coaster ride because we weren’t really sure if we had survivors. It was a few hours of waiting, hoping, waiting, hoping, and finally saying there appears to be no hope. Every single boat that came in that I saw, it was clear there was no survivors. It was a recovery mission, not a rescue mission."

"I was invited to see the work being done to reconstruct the plane in Calverton. That was truly a moving experience. They had all the seats and put them in order. The family could go to each of the seats and leave little mementos. When you see that, it’s a humbling experience."

"Gramps used to take us out tubing and on the Jet Ski. I was on the dock waiting for my turn and I remember my grandmother running to us, saying, ‘A plane just crashed.’ We waved [my siblings and cousins] in. My grandmother said, ‘We got to burn sage and pray because a lot of people died.’ I remember my grandparents doing a lot for the memorial; they were going to Smith Point a lot. My grandmother said, ‘You can’t get in that water, there’s spirits.’ She didn’t get in the water but she would take us to the beach. I could tell there was so much pain, I could feel it."

"Our families lived in Atlanta, which was hosting the Olympics that year. They were leaving town to get away from the crowds for the Olympics. Lamar was an investment banker and he had closed a deal that day. His family, his wife, surviving daughter and son had traveled the same flight the night before. Normally they would have been on the flight."

"It basically shattered the family. After the accident, my brother’s widow just separated from the family, cut off the kids from their grandparents and from us. I was not happy, but people handle grief differently."

"It destroyed our families, shortened my parents' lives. My father died within five years, my mother in 10. They probably would have lived another 10 years, but they were grieving. It’s a terrible thing to watch your parents grieve over a child and a grandchild. That’s not the normal way things happen."

"My brother didn’t get to see his children grow up. My nephew had just learned to drive. I don’t think he’d been on a date yet."

"One family member lost is bad, but two at a time is terrible. The hardest part is you’re in shock for so long, things like that don’t really hit you until there are moments when they should be there and they're not."

“I was a sacristan, set up and clean up the Masses, answered the phones. We were at youth group at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in East Moriches when the crash happened. The next day Father James McDonald got called to go down to do a prayer reading in Center Moriches at Holiday Beach, along the waterfront, and then they did it at Smith Point. I was basically the altar boy, I would hold the Bible for him."

"There were a lot of people standing around, praying. I remember everybody staring at the water. People were upset."

“To me it was kind of normal stuff in a sense because I was always with [McDonald]. We would go to car crashes and perform last rites a lot. Most nights we would leave and go to the hospitals."

“I didn’t notice any change in the community because people who are hurt, upset, could always come to the church. So it felt business as usual. But that Sunday, church was packed. A lot of people, came in praying, hoping that maybe they’d find people. There was hope still alive.”

"I responded in two different fashions, initially as a volunteer firefighter and EMT for the Eastport Fire Department, but I also worked for Suffolk County Fire Rescue and Emergency Services at the time. A day or two later, I responded with them in the command post to assist at the Coast Guard station."

"We’re used to things that are chaotic, noisy, you’re not sure what’s going on. It had this eerie silence about it, an unusually quiet scene despite the scale of the disaster. We went there expecting to assist bringing survivors off the boats, but they were coming in one after another with recovered bodies, which were handled by law enforcement. They created a temporary morgue."

"There’s a certain level of frustration you experience because there’s really nothing you could do but support the other agencies that are there. Typically fire and EMS go in and provide first aid, fire protection, and we weren’t able to do much of anything that night. After several hours, they realized there may not be survivors and they started to scale back the number of agencies there."

"Throughout the event, there was fire and EMS rotating coverage 24 hours a day for the landing zone for helicopters carrying elected officials and investigators and to provide medical care for the staff. There were over 2,500 people at the Coast Guard station."

"I got word that Steve Wick found a boat, and the captain took us out. I imagined a big airplane floating on the water, but when I got there, I didn’t see one. There was just a lot of boats circling around searching for bodies. Then I saw this fire across the water, and I photographed that because that was the only kind of light and the biggest thing that symbolized the event."

"There were no waves, the water was flat as glass. But what got me seasick was the fumes from the boats and the jet fuel from the plane. It was a struggle dealing with that and trying to find pictures: a doll floating in the water, a seat from the plane floating, any article that had a human element to it. We were out there until daybreak. You’re looking for something that’s going to tell the story, and when there’s no light, that’s a very difficult thing. We did run across a body, but as the boat tried to turn, it sunk. It was probably a picture we would never use anyway because you could see the face of the person."

"The saddest thing for me was going to Pennsylvania for a story years later, where a lot of Montoursville Area High School students on the flight were from. It was quite painful when you saw the graveyard. People still couldn’t talk about it. It was still very fresh to them after all those years."

"We were making 500 peanut butter sandwiches a day, just peanut butter and white bread. They would be picked up and taken to the men and women working the recovery at the Coast Guard station. We did this for about a week. I was working as an account clerk for the Center Moriches school district. I was given time off just to go and do this."

"I know our ladies group stayed up at that firehouse with refreshments for anyone that would stop at the firehouse, even the news reporters. There was a bus that came in with rabbis. We stayed most of that first evening just trying to console people, comfort anyone that came in. It was nothing heroic, we were just trying to keep everyone as comfortable as could be. Roads were shut down, it was a very crazy evening."

"Myself and another woman from the school then worked down at the Coast Guard station to help serve refreshments down there, which was something I will never forget. Everything was done with such discretion, such dignity. I get emotional thinking about that week down there. The men and women were so professional. I worked right where the boats were coming in, and they would say 'turn around.'

"It was one of those devastating moments in life that you don't forget. The sorrow it brought to the community, the people who worked there and for the families it must have been horrendous."

"To anyone on Long Island, it brings back such sadness that this could happen in your own backyard. It's just overwhelming."

“We were all camping out on the beach. I was on the way in on the boat, and my two buddies were on the way out. We passed each other. They saw the fireball. I went home and put the Yankee game on, across the bottom there was a scroll notifying anybody with boats in the East Moriches area, that there’s been a plane crash. You couldn’t even move in town. First thing I did was jump in the boat like everybody else did, but I couldn’t get out to where the wreckage was, but many of my friends were out there and they were assisting in pulling people out, which is a horrible tale to listen to. It was a horrible event in this town’s history and you think of all the kids on it, everybody that was lost. I guess at the end of the day you got to figure if there was more to the story, it probably would have come out by now. My thoughts and prayers are always with the families. It devastated the whole neighborhood. It devastated this nation. It seemed to bring a lot of people together at the same time."

"My son was on a flight to go to Israel. His flight was canceled and they put him on another flight, which I didn’t know at the time. Unfortunately they put him on TWA Flight 800. When I came home from work, I turned on the news and I saw the ocean on fire. I knew, I just knew my son was on that flight. I don’t know how, but I knew. It wasn't till the next day that my niece who was in Paris at the time went to the airport and called me. He was in college and he was going to Israel. He flew there often in the summertime. He was an excellent student."

"It does not get easier. The only thing that’s easier, a little bit, is that it’s easier to breathe. Every year we go to his gravesite. His friends from high school and college still come. Every year, for 30 years, they have come. They were very close, his group of friends. That, to me, means a tremendous amount, that they haven’t forgotten, that my son still means a lot to them."

“They chartered a small fishing boat for me, I had to be in Hampton Bays at 5 a.m. the next morning. We were waiting for some TV crew from the city to come out, so we waited an hour and a half which was frustrating knowing what was going on out there. Our boat's crew found some debris and took it out. There was nothing that big they couldn’t handle themselves. I didn’t really see any bodies or seats or anything. It was just hard metal parts. That changed when I saw a stuffed animal floating heads up, a Bugs Bunny character floating in the water. That stuck with me since then. At first glance, it looked too much like a body so we didn’t use that picture in the paper."

“For photojournalists, your assignment is to go out, get pictures to relay what happened. Even though emotionally it might be something that troubles you or it’s hard to think about, you still have to go out there and get what you can. We wish it hadn’t happened and feel bad for the people who list their lives and their families who lost their loved ones.”

"I was actually at MacArthur Airport after flying, hanging out in the pilots lounge. Some guys came back from a night flight, they heard radio chatter about people on the lookout for wreckage in the sea. We turned the TV on and saw it on the news. Instantaneously, our discussion was about what causes a 747 to explode, and the conclusion we all had was that there was a bomb on it. I mean, 747s at that time were the most prolific airliners in the sky, the safest airplanes in the air. They don’t just explode."

“We spend one part of the quarter discussing aviation accidents and incidents. Anytime we look at an accident, we teach them about the chain of events that causes it. The airplane doesn’t fly along and the wings fall off. One thing leads to another, a chain of events that you have to recognize early and try and stop it before it terminates in your demise. With that one, the chain of events, according to the NTSB, not a lot of those things could have been avoided by human intervention. It’s not a good example of how airplane accidents work. It seemed like extremely bad luck. There wasn’t a lot of things anybody could do to save that airplane. That was one of those very rare cases where you’re flying along and the wings fall off."

“The place I worked had a number of guys who had fishing boats. One of them, he was really upset, he was a Vietnam vet. He went out, he thought there he could rescue people swimming. It wasn’t that way, there was bodies. I don’t know if he had PTSD, but he was out of work for a while. He brought not bodies, but some suitcases to the Coast Guard station. The boats were bringing insulation and suitcases and I assume a lot of bodies. I do remember him maybe six months later talking about it, he was very badly affected by it. I think there were a lot of people that were really very upset about it because it's right in the neighborhood. I don’t fly much now, but I did fly for business, and it was always a minor concern. But being an engineer, I know the statistics of it and you’re more likely to [die] on the LIE than you are on an airplane.”

"I was working that night and assigned to go to Smith Point. There were people on the beach who witnessed the plane fall out of the sky. It was the closest place on land to where the plane crashed. It became a natural spot for people to gather, at first hoping there were survivors, then to console each other. To this day, three decades later, people still gather at Smith Point on July 17 to remember everyone who died."

"Family members would look out into the waves. There was a lot of hugging and crying. People would bring flowers. I felt horrible for them."

"One of the things that got to me the most was there was a group of kids from Montoursville, Pennsylvania, on a school trip to France, and of course all of them died. The thought of a bunch of young kids from a small town all being killed was horrible. I was sent to Montoursville close to the first anniversary of the crash. The people were just devastated, and it did not help that the entire international media showed up in this small town. We kept our distance because they felt the insensitivity that can happen when the entire press corps is breathing down your neck to get a story."

"I think it’s a subtle reminder that nothing in life is certain. I’ve flown dozens of times since then, but I do think of that every time I get on an airplane."

"I remember it like it was yesterday. My wife told me a plane went down, then we got paged out to the Coast Guard station. Shortly thereafter, they started bringing body parts into the Coast Guard station. It was really pandemonium because the whole world descended on our community. We’re a small little town and nobody was prepared for something like that. We basically acted as, more or less, traffic control through town, as well as security down at the Coast Guard station. There were volunteers that went out with their own boats. At the time, our department didn’t have a boat and we were not prepared or trained to do anything like that."

"We helped set up the temporary morgue at the Coast Guard station. They brought people in in body bags. Right away, we knew it was recovery."

"We were an aid station providing coffee and water at the firehouse for all the recovery workers for the next week or 10 days. Police personnel and politicians were in and out. The governor was here, the county personnel. It was really taken over by the professionals. We did whatever we could. Our role was more of a support role. Now there’s much more training for that kind of response. Thirty years ago, we were prepared to fight fires, not major water rescues. Now we have a rescue boat."

“I lived on the bay; you could see all the activity. The really strange part was then being on the beach for the rest of that summer, just not knowing what was going to come washing up. It was upsetting. Everybody was obviously talking about it. They put a memorial at Kalers Pond Park. That was a big deal. It was a very somber and sad reality that happened so close to where we lived. You hear about these tragedies happening, but it’s usually not right in your backyard. I can’t believe it’s 30 years ago."