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Remembrance Scholars vow to 'act forward' in memory of Pan Am 103

Ryan Delaney
/
WRVO

The Syracuse University community Friday remembered the students it lost 25 years ago when a passenger jet they were on was taken down by a terrorist attack.

Pan Am Flight 103 crashed into Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988. Two-hundred seventy people were killed, including 35 SU students returning home from a semester abroad in London.

Since then, Syracuse University has selected 35 current students each year to be a Remembrance Scholar. Roses were placed on the stone memorial and each victim's name read aloud. The rose laying ceremony culminates a week of events known as Remembrance Week.

Kara Weipz was 15 years old when her brother, Rick Monetti, was killed in the attack. She later went to SU herself. She brought her three children to the ceremony Friday. She says Remembrance Week is important because it’s about remembering the people.

"And that’s what makes this week so special because it’s remembering the people," she said. "Not all the other stuff, it’s just strictly the people."

Even though the Lockerbie victims are from a different generation as the current scholars, Weipz says the victims are just like the students on campus today.

"Even though they were from a different generation, still, it could have been your roommate, the kid you sit next to in class, it could be anyone that you walk on this campus with every day," she said. "And in 1988, that’s who it was, it was the people they walked on this campus  with every day."

As each remembrance scholar laid a rose on the memorial, they promised "to act forward in (his or her) memory."