The scars in this village - both physical and emotional - were clear to see Thursday, in daylight, after Pan Am Flight 103 fell from the sky Wednesday night.
Eight bodies lay on a golf course, covered in tarpaulins and guarded by police, and the town hall became a makeshift morgue as firefighters recovered remains strewn about town. Children played beside twisted airplane wreckage. A long, deep trench was torn, like a black scar, along a row of houses. Other homes, drenched in flaming aviation fuel, were gutted.
``It is beyond one`s comprehension,`` murmured Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who toured Lockerbie. ``It is beyond one`s imagination.... You have to come here to see it and to realize.`` Residents recalled whooshing noises and tremendous flames as the stricken Boeing 747 jumbo jet roared low overhead, spewing pieces over the rolling countryside and finally crashing in fragments across their streets and houses in the dark.
Survivors comforted each other, felt lucky to be alive and tried to clean up some of the mess in the town of 2,500 people.
In a yard next to the main street lay the cover of one engine. The fence and building next door were undamaged. Children bicycled around a chunk of fuselage, and a grocer boarded up his shattered storefront.
Scorched pillows, charred dollar bills, tattered copies of the Pan Am inflight magazine and fragments of clothing lay scattered on the ground. Chunks of metal, some as small as coins and others 2 feet in diameter, had sliced through roofs and shattered windows in homes and cars.
Four miles outside town, the nose cone of the blue-and-white jumbo jet was tipped on its side in a muddy field.
``There`ll be no Christmas this year as far as Lockerbie is concerned,`` said Bobby Scott, a builder who dashed out after he heard the explosion Wednesday night and watched the jet break up over a hill about 200 yards from Lockerbie`s main street.
``There were flames everywhere and pieces dropping off the plane, and it just kept going,`` said Scott, 30, who escaped unscathed.
``I was very, very lucky. Many of us here were.``
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Matthew Trento still held his ticket for Pan Am Flight 103 when he arrived home in New York, safe and sound, one of the lucky ones.
Trento, a senior at Syracuse University, lost three roommates on Flight 103. He would also have been aboard if his mother hadn`t booked him on another flight, five hours earlier.
``I was sitting there looking at my ticket after the flight went down,`` said Trento, 22. ``It really just made me wonder.``
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A 21-year-old former Charlotte resident was among the victims of the crash of Pan Am flight 103.
Luann Rogers, daughter of Oregon and Anne Rogers, formerly of Highbrook Drive, had been in London as part of a Syracuse University study program and was returning to the family`s home in Olney, Md.
The Rogers family had been members of Chantilly Baptist Church - now Cornerstone Baptist Church - and Luann Rogers attended Idlewild Elementary School. They left Charlotte about 1977.