Court House Parents of Flight 103 Victim Interviewed for Documentary

COURT HOUSE – While most people like to think of the holiday season as a season of cheer, the holidays are an especially difficult time of year for one couple who lost their only child 27 years ago when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.
“This is an especially difficult time of year for us,” said Court House resident Susan Cohen, mother of Theo, who was a Syracuse University (SU) junior studying abroad in London at the time. Theo and 34 other SU students were returning home for the holidays aboard Pan Am 103 when it exploded over Lockerbie. In total, 259 people aboard the plane and 11 people on the ground were killed.
“We do our best to get through the holidays,” she noted, talking about herself and her husband, Daniel. “The grief of losing a child changes everything for you. You do go on living, and try to be happy and contribute and be worthwhile, but life doesn’t diminish your grief.”
The Cohens are among several families interviewed as part of a new documentary, “SINCE: The Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103,” which made its East Coast debut Dec. 6 at the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival in Sag Harbor, N.Y.
Written and directed by Phil Furey, the 84-minute feature documentary film traces the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, killing 270 people and “ushering the frightful new age of terrorism. Bound together in tragedy, the film shows how the victims’ relatives fought tooth and nail for justice, only to watch it unravel for Libyan oil.”
“Dan and Susan Cohen are two of the film’s subjects and their tireless campaign to keep the bombing in the news is a major driving force of the film,” Furey said.
Furey is a Los Angeles, Calif.-based documentary filmmaker, TV news producer and reporter, previously for Reuters, as well as a film score composer and vocalist.
“I had no prior connection to the Lockerbie families before making this film,” he continued. “However, when I was looking at colleges in the late ‘90s, I toured Syracuse University and I remember coming across the memorial to the 35 SU students there. I remember when the tour guide told us about the bombing and how it affected the school, something didn’t sit right in my gut, and I thought about the bombing for the rest of that day.
“I didn’t end up applying to the school, and I went about my life as everyone does,” Furey said. “Then I came across an article about Suse (Lowenstein) and her artwork (Dark Elegy), and read about her son Alexander, who was one of the Syracuse students. I was instantly transported back to that day.
“I also realized that I had come home from my own semester abroad in London on Dec. 21, 2001,” he recalled. “I went back and looked at my ticket, and it was the same exact flight, Heathrow to JFK, around 6 p.m. on the same day. So I was able to see myself in the disaster, and to see that this could be my parents being interviewed, had I been born 13 years earlier.”
Cohen said she has been asked previously to support various films about Pan Am 103, but hadn’t because some of the directors “Didn’t believe Libya was involved. When I met Phil, I found him to be straight-forward and an exceptional journalist and researcher, so I wanted to help support his efforts,” she said.
Furey said he made “SINCE” because he was “shocked” a feature documentary film about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 had not been produced. Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is believed to have ordered the bombing, which was carried out by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer convicted of the crime in 2001.
Gaddafi later accepted responsibility for the bombing and paid families of the victims each $10 million. He was murdered by his own people during the Arab Spring movement in 2011. 
Megrahi only served eight years of his life sentence, being released in 2009 in a controversy later linked to a British Petroleum oil contract. Megrahi was released on “compassionate grounds” because he was said to be suffering from terminal prostate cancer, but lived 33 months as a free man before dying in 2012. 
Earlier this year, the government announced it is investigating two new leads in association with the bombing.
“I started the film as a short documentary project almost 10 years ago,” Furey said, “with the idea that it would be a documentary about sculptor Suse Lowenstein, and her harrowing work of art called Dark Elegy, which freezes in time the moment that she and nearly 80 other women – mothers, daughters, sisters, wives – all learned of the plane going down.
“When I interviewed her, and she started telling me about the continual injustices this group of people endured by everyone including the government, the airline and Libya, I was flabbergasted that this was not common knowledge in the United States,” he added.
One of the items pointed out in the film, Furey said, is that “families received their loved ones’ bodies at the animal and livestock section of Kennedy airport, forklifted off spray-painted trucks, with no government representatives present.”
It also shows that George H.W. Bush didn’t mention the bombing when he gave his inaugural address less than 30 days afterward.
“I simply want people to know about the crime and to see, literally, the documentation of it,” Furey explained. “Documentaries are incredibly effective educational tools, and I think this could be something that people might be willing to commit to, as opposed to reading a handful of books or several hundred news articles about the bombing.”
Furey believes “the problem with the crime as a story was that it was too vast and too complex for the general public to understand. Because the investigation and the mystery of who had committed it, together with the massive hurdles it took to bring the perpetrators to justice, unfolded over a period of decades, not hours as it happened on Sept. 11, the public wasn’t able to grasp it.
“I’m just glad I was there filming to capture the outrageous release of Megrahi by Scottish officials, which was the result of absolutely shameful backdoor dealings with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who held a BP oil contract hostage if Megrahi wasn’t released,” he noted. “So the film ends up being a much more potent statement about oil, and the fact that we are willing to excuse the heinous murder of civilians in order to have access to it.”
Cohen and her husband, both freelance writers, wrote their own story about their “search for justice” in the 1990s, called “Pan Am 103: The bombing, the betrayals and a bereaved family’s search for justice.”
“The book and our fight for justice are our memorial to Theo,” Cohen said about her daughter, who wanted to be an actress and singer. “She was spending the semester in London where they have great theater, growing up and experiencing all she could. She loved to travel, and was a drama and voice major at Syracuse.”
The book first came out in hardcover, but after the Cohens spent six days in The Netherlands attending Megrahi’s trial, they added to the book and it was republished as a paperback.
“I’ve never been to Lockerbie,” Cohen noted. “That’s really a personal thing. If my daughter had been hit on the road, I would not want to stand on the side of the road to look at it. I just never wanted to go.”
When the airplane exploded, the Cohens were living in Port Jervis, N.Y., and eventually found the memories to be painful and decided to move.
“We had been to Cape May with friends and liked it,” Cohen said. “So we came down here to look for a house in Cape May. Because we were looking for something a little different in that we both worked from home so we needed offices, we found something we liked in Court House, and we’ve been here ever since.”
Many family members of the victims are from New Jersey: The first meeting of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 was held at the Crow’s Nest restaurant in Hasbrouck Heights. It was the close geography of the victims’ families that allowed them to solidify in the early days. Cohen said she remains friends with some of the family group today.
While Cohen admits there “never can be justice for the loss of a child,” she said she does feel some sense of justice because the Libyan people eventually demonstrated against Gaddafi, and he was murdered. “I know people say they don’t like to see people murdered, and there is no ultimate justice because nothing takes away your grief, but that day when Gaddafi died, was a good day for me,” she said. 
“It’s not an American characteristic to be pessimistic, but the only way I can describe things is that I feel like I am living on the edge of the Grand Canyon,” Cohen continued. “Every once in awhile, I find myself falling in. I pull myself out and continue living. It’s always difficult, but sometimes it’s more difficult. I just want to get through this time of year.”
Cohen admitted she has not seen the film yet, although she did receive a copy from Furey. “For me, it’s not only reliving the loss of my daughter Theo, it’s reliving the loss of my husband, who suffered a stroke nearly seven years ago,” she said. “The film shows Dan as he was before the stroke, as a very strong man. The stroke really disabled him, but his mind is still good so he still feels the pain of our loss. I’m sure it’s a very powerful film, but I’m not ready to watch it yet.”
The documentary was Furey’s directorial debut. “I have to admit, I’ve aged quite a bit in the past decade,” he said. “It was really tough to take this on because once I got to know and love all these wonderful people, I became defensive over them and enraged on their behalf.
“The way they were treated made me a very cynical person and I’m sorry to say that that cynicism still exists today,” he noted. “It’s tempered somewhat now, but that’s only because I get to walk away unharmed from this story. Unfortunately, that can’t be said for the people who had someone on that flight.
“The insults just keep coming for these families,” Furey said. “This should be taught in schools, and it hasn’t been given the heft it deserves, but not because the families didn’t try. They have been rattling their sabres since Dec. 21, 1988, but collectively we just haven’t noticed, which is extremely sad and troubling given that there is no reason other than unfortunate luck that these families, and not mine or yours, are in this place to begin with.”
To contact Karen Knight, email kknight@cmcherald.com.