This is Dateline Sunday, September 6th, 1998, tonight.
On Canada's coast, Labor Day weekend spent in mourning and remembering the victims of Swiss Air Flight 111.
I've dealt with many situations in my life, never one of this magnitude, of so many at one time.
Families grieve as divers battling choppy seas recover a critical piece of evidence.
I have just heard from news, given to me this moment, that the recorder that was found was the flight data recorder.
Chris Hansen with the latest clues to the mystery of what happened.
Among those killed on Swiss Air Flight 111, the story of a man who made a difference.
I'm mourning him for us, my children, but a little bit for the world, not the whole world, but the people he would have helped and touched.
Peer-scarity risked death for the sake of the needy, in some of the world's most dangerous places.
Mike Taivi remembers the life of a selfless maverick.
The Swiss Air crash, reminder of another tragedy two years ago.
A lot of times I think it would be so much easier if we'd all crashed, because at least you all would have been together.
A family coping with unspeakable loss after the crash of TWA Flight 800.
You're angry at just life and itself. You're angry at God.
Sarah James on struggling through the darkest hours of grief.
He says he was using marijuana to ease his crippling pain.
I looked at his in medicine.
But prosecutors insist he was no innocent victim.
Will Foster couldn't have used this much marijuana in his entire life.
Was there more going on here than anyone thought?
Have you ever sold drugs to anyone?
Rob Stafford on the scales of justice and the search for truth.
Dateline with Jane Pauli and Stone Phillips.
Plus Tom Brokaw, Katie Currie and Maria Shriver.
From Studio 3B in Rockefeller Center, here is Stone Phillips.
Good evening. Still, the answers have not come.
The mysteries to the crash of Swiss Air Flight 111 remain buried off the rocky coast of Canada.
And some families of the 229 crash victims remain huddled in tiny Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia.
A picturesque town used to tourists, but not to this.
As salvage crews look to the deep for answers, families now look to the heavens.
Chris Hanson has the latest.
Nothing can prepare us for something like this.
Neither our education, nor our upbringing, nor our experience can save us from the devastating effect of such a blow.
Nova Scotia is grieving on a holiday weekend usually spent savoring the last warm days of summer.
From morning until dusk today, the victims of Swiss Air Flight 111 were remembered at church services,
including one at St. Mary's Basilica in Halifax.
Even though we do not have the answers, our faith helps us.
Over the weekend, Monsignor Martin Currie helped counsel family members who began arriving here on Friday.
I've dealt with many situations in my never one of this magnitude, of so many at one time.
I received the information.
Tonight, an important new development in the investigation.
After days of searching, Canadian officials announced divers found one of the black boxes.
The recorder that was found was the Flight Data Recorder.
The discovery of the Flight Data Recorder, much like this one, is important
because it can give investigators information on more than a hundred different mechanical and electronic functions,
final clues in solving the mystery surrounding this crash.
Also tonight, word that divers found three large chunks of the plane's fuselage near the data recorder,
five miles southwest of Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia.
This weekend, Canadian officials released the first partial transcripts of the radio transmissions
between the crew and air traffic controllers the night of the crash.
The first sign of trouble occurred 400 miles into the scheduled flight from New York's Kennedy Airport to Geneva.
At around 10.14 p.m. local time, 56 minutes into the flight, a call from the pilot using an aviator's term for trouble.
Swiss Air 111 Heavy is declaring pan, pan, pan. We have smoke in the cockpit. Request deviate.
Immediate right turn to a convenient place. I guess Boston, he tells the controller in a calm voice.
But at that point, flying through the night just off the coast of Nova Scotia,
the crew of Swiss Air Flight 111 was told by the controller that Halifax was closer than Boston.
In fact, Boston was 300 miles behind them, while Halifax was just 70 miles away.
But even though they were so close, choosing Halifax provided the crew no easy options.
Investigators say the MD-11 weighed approximately 230 tons,
and in order to make a safe landing, it would have to drop 30 tons of fuel.
But it would take 12 minutes to burn off the fuel, and the plane had to descend from 33,000 feet.
The controller told the crew, you've got 30 miles to fly to the threshold of the runway at Halifax.
The crew radioed back, we need more than 30 miles.
A few minutes later, the crew radioed, we must dump some fuel. We may do that in this area during descent.
Moments later, as the jetliner was crossing over the small communities that dot the Nova Scotia coastline,
the situation on board Flight 111 was apparently deteriorating.
Investigators now suspect the pilots put on smoke herds,
which is standard procedure when there's dense smoke in the cockpit.
Then came the words no pilot ever wants to say.
The pilot radioed, we are declaring an emergency.
It was 10 minutes since they reported trouble.
The pilot added, we have to land immediately.
Six minutes later, the MD-11 with 229 people aboard slammed into the sea off the tiny fishing village of Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia.
Given the fact that there were no communications from the plane during the last six minutes of the flight,
and the plane was lost from radar, how seriously do you have to look at a total electrical failure?
Certainly we will be looking at every reason why that was the condition,
and electrical problems is certainly an area of exploration for us.
Investigators are hopeful they'll soon have much more to go on.
Tonight, the ship that helped in the massive recovery effort of TWA Flight 800, the USS Grapple, is on its way to help here.
Meanwhile, the search continues, and so does the grieving.
I try to help people to see that God will not abandon them.
Life will never be the same again for them.
Life will be changed, and life will be different, you know, but that they can go on.
Swissner Flight 111 was sometimes referred to as the United Nations Shuttle, because it often carried prominent UN employees.
And such was the case Wednesday night.
Among those on board was Pierce Garrity, who devoted his life to helping refugees from war and other disasters around the world,
putting himself in almost constant danger.
Mike Tieve, he looks at his life and his accomplishments.
Pierce was a man who had a passion for justice and a total intolerance for inequity in the world,
and I think that drove just about every one of his actions.
Marie de la Soudière is talking about her husband, Pierce Garrity,
who perished in the crash of Swissair Flight 111 just five days before his 57th birthday.
And the actions she's talking about were in the life he chose and she shared with him.
Together, they traveled the world's hot spots, providing food, shelter, and comfort to imperiled refugees
from Cambodia in the late 70s to Rwanda and Somalia in the 90s.
There's always this latent instability, the fear that the Civil War will break out again.
If he knows there is a suffering human being and there is something perhaps he can do, he was compelled.
It was his passion.
It was his life.
It was his life.
It certainly didn't have to be his life.
The man shoving a truck along the edge of a refugee camp came from a background of Connecticut comfort, then Yale and Harvard Law.
But he gave all that up, for good a quarter century ago, to work among the poorest of the poor in one crisis after another.
All of those who have received too much of a duty to help the others.
Was it really as simple as that?
It was as simple as that.
As an official at the UN's High Commission for Refugees, Garrity could have directed policy from his office in Geneva.
Instead, he kept returning to the front lines.
September of 97 found Pierce and Marie in the eastern Congo in the midst of a bloody Civil War.
This was awful.
There were 120,000 refugees in the middle of the forest.
A rebel government had just taken over.
Garrity volunteered once more to put his own safety on the line to help others.
The situation is very bad.
We got the word by the commanders of the camp that the rebels were coming within hours to attack the camp.
And there was nothing we could do. We were just two people.
We got on our plane and we left, leaving these other people behind.
And then within the next day or two, they sealed that area and a horrible massacre took place.
How did Pierce deal with that failure?
He felt terrible, but maybe it was only the second or third time in his whole life that I saw him cry.
But Pierce Garrity wasn't finished, his wife says. He dealt with it and moved on to the next crisis.
Here at the UN, those who worked with him say his will to carry on, to involve himself physically as the ultimate relief worker, was legendary.
He was someone with vision who could see what needed to be done and was willing to do it.
He was very rational, very cool, and very clever.
Do you remember this, Papa?
As Marie sat Thursday night with the couple's three children, sifting through pictures and memories,
she considered the terrible irony that in a marriage of more than three decades,
spent in circumstances of repeated, incalculable risk,
Pierce Garrity should die in the comfort of a jetliner operated by one of the world's safest airlines.
I thought we were prepared. We'd been preparing each other for years.
We said, you're going to this dangerous mission, so we always say, hey, you know, we may die.
Then were you prepared?
No, I wasn't prepared at all.
I'm mourning him for ourselves, for us and my children, but it sounds a little grandiose,
but a little bit for the world, the people he would have helped and touched.
Pierce Garrity's brother was quoted as saying it seemed like he was constantly courting risk and always got away scot-free.
If you'd like to find out the very latest on the investigation into why Flight 111 crashed
or get the hotline numbers for victims' families to call, you can log on to our Dateline website.
The address is www.dateline.msnbc.com.
This is Dateline Sunday for September 6th with reports tonight from Rob Stafford, Sarah James, Chris Hanson, and Mike Taivi.
Coming up, is this man growing marijuana to control his pain or doing something worse?
Have you ever sold methamphetamine there?
No, I have not.
Was he a criminal or a victim?
From Studio 3B in Rockefeller Center, here is Jane Pauling.
Here's something to think about. Is there ever a time when breaking the law is okay?
You're about to meet a man who says he broke the law because there was no other way to ease his pain.
But you'll want to hear the full story before you make up your mind.
Here's Rob Stafford.
I had my pride. I stood up for what I believed in.
William Foster took a stand and is paying with his life.
At age 39, a jury sentenced him to nearly a century in prison for a crime he says had no victims and shouldn't be a crime at all.
I didn't do anything wrong. I had a life. I was productive. I paid taxes. I supported my family.
Had you ever been in trouble before?
No. Never. No.
Foster never dreamt he'd become a symbol in a national debate.
He's an Army veteran, spent four years in the military police.
He had his own computer business and a peaceful family life, he says, until the afternoon of December 28, 1995 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I was in the garden working and I heard a loud bang.
Foster's common-law wife Meg was in the hallway.
There was a knock on the front door. I could see the profile of a man. My first initial thought was a utility person.
Meg was wrong. She says before she could open the door...
It explodes in, in seconds, within four seconds. They battered around the door.
Strangers had barged into the Foster home.
They pushed me on the floor. You've got the gun in my face. My daughter's screaming. I had no idea who this was.
It was the Tulsa Police Department running rampant through my house.
It was a drug bust.
They slammed me up against the wall and handcuffed me.
They dragged me from the living room to the den to the master bedroom, wanting to know if I had seen methamphetamines in this house.
Police believe Foster was selling methamphetamines out of his house.
I didn't know what they were talking about.
Have you ever sold drugs to anyone?
No, I have not.
Have you ever sold methamphetamine to anyone?
No, I have not. The police are lying.
Police videotaped the bust, but they found no methamphetamines in the Foster house.
They found no large stash of cash, only $28, but they did find something else.
I had a plant. A plant. That's it. That's like declaring war on tomatoes.
Not exactly. Foster wasn't growing tomatoes in his garden. He was growing marijuana.
A plant that can be used as medicine. I looked at it as medicine.
Foster says he's a sick man, a man with crippling arthritis.
He's in constant pain with badly swollen hands and feet.
On your worst day, what was it like?
Well, sometimes it would take me 15 minutes to walk across the room.
My foot had been so swollen up that my toes wouldn't even touch the ground.
There were days I knew he was sitting there holding back tears because it hurt.
Prescription drugs didn't help, Foster says. The side effects were unbearable.
All he would want to do is sleep.
He would be a completely different person, hateful.
He was useless. The business would go down because he was just too tired.
Back in 1990, Will says, his doctor suggested marijuana, and the results changed his life.
He was able to function. He could smoke a joint, still sit down, work the computer, do the books, not be sleepy or irritable all day.
It gave him pain management, if not complete alleviation.
While voters in California legalized the medical use of marijuana in 1996, that is not the case in Oklahoma.
It's against the law.
Well, it's against some people's law, yes.
You know, if it's the only way that you could get your medicine, then I just didn't see anything wrong with it.
But the state of Oklahoma did. Both Meg and Will were charged with cultivation of marijuana.
Will was also charged with possession with intent to distribute.
He was offered a plea bargain of 10 years. Meg, 5. They refused.
Somebody had to be here to raise these kids. And if he took the deal, and he went in and I went in, then where did they end up with? Foster homes?
Will also knew if he pleaded guilty, he'd forfeit his right to appeal. So prosecutors offered another deal.
Will would get his day in court. Meg would get a one-year deferred sentence for possession.
But in exchange, Meg would have to testify against the man she loved.
It was really hard. He was crying, too.
I would rather have done anything else, but I couldn't.
So she says the state squeezed her to get him. In the end, Meg took the stand, and she testified about Will's growing pot, and also told the jury she and his friends smoked with him.
If you're seriously ill and you're looking at this as medication, what are you doing taking it with friends and with Meg?
That was their choice. A lot of times they had their own marijuana. 90% of the time I smoked marijuana by myself.
On January 16, 1997, 12 citizens of Tulsa not only found Will guilty, they also determined his punishment.
Oklahoma is one of the few states where juries both convict and sentence. And it has one of the toughest drug laws in the nation.
I knew he was going to serve some time. It's Oklahoma, after all. I wasn't prepared for what he got.
What he got was 93 years. The jury gave him 70 years for cultivation of marijuana, 20 more for possession in the presence of a child, another three years for other related charges.
When the verdict was read, Foster looked at his wife.
It looked like somebody ripped her heart out. I mean, you know, she's very pale on the verge of hysteria.
93 years, you know, for pot. That's overkill to me. I mean, he didn't kill anybody. That's a death sentence.
A travesty of justice cried Foster's outraged supporters. One even created a website for the Foster story, a story that has made it all the way to Capitol Hill.
We cite Will Foster, a 30-year-old father of three.
Last year, Foster's case came before a congressional hearing on legalizing medicinal marijuana.
Foster was held up as a victim of unfair drug laws, laws which punish patients who are already suffering.
The war on drugs, as I said, is an unmitigated disaster.
As doctors, legislators, and even the Office of the Drugs are consider this issue, Foster's case was brought front and center to the debate.
He is presented as a prisoner of war, the war on drugs. But is Will Foster really the victim he claims to be?
There is more to the Will Foster story that even his supporters don't know.
We'll find out more about Will Foster when we come back.
Had you ever been in trouble before?
No.
Never.
From our studios in New York, here again is Stone Phillips.
Returning to our story, Will Foster has been convicted of marijuana charges and sentenced to nearly a century in prison.
He says he did nothing wrong, that he needed the pot to ease his pain.
But as you're about to see, Will Foster may not be quite as innocent as he claims.
Here again, Rob Stafford.
Will Foster's life behind bars has made him a symbol, a symbol of the injustice of drug laws.
While his website rallies supporters, we wondered if there was more to the Will Foster story.
To hear him tell it, he's been victimized twice.
First by a crippling condition, then by a system that locked him away for growing marijuana to treat his pain.
I know the pain that I felt. I know how I felt off my prescription drugs. I know how I felt off marijuana.
If it made me feel better, then I should be able to do it.
Foster says rheumatoid arthritis causes him to limp, has formed knots in his hands, curled his fingers, and swelled his feet.
So how could a jury ignore that?
While there is no medical exception for marijuana use in Oklahoma, jurors could have considered that fact as a mitigating circumstance.
But we learned Foster never gave them the opportunity.
The reason you were growing that marijuana was because of your medical problems.
That's correct.
How many doctors did you call to testify during your trial?
I didn't call any.
And you think the jury's going to buy that without hearing from a doctor?
That wasn't my decision. I hired an attorney to put on my case, and I wanted to bring in a doctor, and he thought it was best not.
Will Foster was not prescribed the marijuana, wasn't told to use the marijuana by a health care practitioner.
Edward Sutherland was Foster's attorney. He says at that time, there was no doctor treating Foster for arthritis.
No doctor treating him who could testify that he needed marijuana for pain.
The jury only heard this from Meg.
Even in states which permit marijuana for medical use, it has to be under doctor's orders, orders Foster never received.
He simply discovered that that alleviated the effects of his arthritis.
So who suggested marijuana in the first place?
Foster told us it was a chiropractor who believed in natural healing, but he advised marijuana for back pain, not arthritis.
And how do we know Foster even has rheumatoid arthritis?
Well, they gave us the names of two doctors.
One wouldn't talk to us without Foster's written permission, permission Foster refused to give.
The other said she only saw Foster once after his conviction.
And though she believes he has the condition, she says that diagnosis needs to be confirmed by a specialist.
You're not even sure if you had a firm diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis before the bust in December of 95.
That is correct.
Yet on your own, you go out and start growing marijuana to treat it.
That's correct. I was in a lot of pain, a lot of swelling in my feet, hurt to walk.
A humane plea. Foster also could have made to the jury.
Perhaps if they'd heard it, he wouldn't be in prison for 93 years.
But just as no doctors testified, neither did Foster.
Why?
Because I had a prior and my lawyer didn't think that it would be best for me to testify.
A prior conviction. Remember what Will told us earlier?
Had you ever been in trouble before?
No.
Never?
No.
What was the prior for?
Obtaining a controlled substance by fraud.
So you had a drug conviction in your past?
Yes.
My former employer got addicted to Demerol and I went with him to file a prescription.
I didn't realize that he was fraudulently doing these prescriptions.
But we discovered a different story.
Your name was on the prescription.
I don't know about that. I never seen the prescriptions.
According to court records, Foster's name was on five prescriptions.
He pleaded guilty and received a two-year suspended sentence.
But again, we found there was more to his past.
Were you ever busted for marijuana?
Yes, one time. Back in 87.
New Mexico.
That's correct.
The first charge was possession with intent to distribute.
It was dropped to simple possession, a misdemeanor.
Foster was hoping for the same conviction this time.
But testimony the jury did hear convinced them otherwise.
A man that knew what he was doing.
J.J. Gray is the detective who busted Foster.
Because he works undercover, we agreed not to show his face.
Had you ever seen anything like it before?
No, sir.
That was my first actual indoor grow I'd ever seen.
An indoor grow.
Right beside the kitchen, police discovered stairs leading to what was once a bomb shelter.
Down those stairs, they found Will Foster's secret garden.
Did this look like the operation of just a man who was growing pot for himself, Bowman?
No, sir.
What did it look like?
A man who was growing marijuana and distributing it or selling it.
Police counted 76 plants.
It was a hydroponic garden, marijuana cultivated without soil.
Special growing solutions and artificial lights nourish the plants, which are rooted in gravel or sponges.
This was the largest cultivation case that Tulsa County has seen.
And had seen up to that point.
We still haven't had one like that.
Paul Wilkening and Brian Crane prosecuted Will Foster.
Will Foster says it was all for personal use.
Will Foster couldn't have used this much marijuana in his entire life.
Not only was pot growing in the basement, police say they found almost three pounds of dried marijuana,
some of it bagged, upstairs in the bedrooms, in tupperware under the bed, on the floor near the computer,
on a sweater rack in the closet not far from digital scales and baggies.
All evidence, investigators say, of dealing.
And what concerned them even more was they found that pot right next to Meg's daughter's bedroom.
How could you do that with kids in the house?
When they don't see it, you're not flaunting it, they don't know it's there.
They're talking about a bomb shelter of 10 by 10 feet with a corrugated steel door set into the floor and a lock on it.
The Fosters insist all their pot was locked away from the children at all times.
And it was the police who placed the marijuana in areas near the child's bedroom
to add the charge of possession in the presence of a minor.
I mean, I wouldn't leave a big blue tub of marijuana laying in the floor.
I mean, let's be real. They bagged marijuana up for me.
Said I had 11 bags of marijuana. I never had 11 bags of marijuana.
Police say Foster's accusation is ridiculous, a convicted man's last attempt to get out of jail.
And prosecutors say they didn't need the additional charge.
The amount of pot found in the house and the size of his garden was plenty of evidence to convict.
Well, it's not really that much marijuana.
While it might look like there was lots of pot growing, Foster called an expert witness,
a columnist for High Times Magazine, who told the jury the yield from the entire garden would be one man's supply, about three pounds a year.
But the police calculations were different.
Their estimate, just one plant would produce about two pounds of marijuana.
As for the dried marijuana, Foster says only an ounce and a half was smokable.
The rest was roots and stems.
I don't know what the smokable portion of marijuana plant is.
In the law in Oklahoma, it doesn't differentiate between the leaf, the stalk, the branch.
Marijuana is marijuana in Oklahoma.
But if only an ounce and a half was smokable, he may have been using it just for medicinal purposes.
That might have been, but I don't necessarily buy into the fact that Will Foster was that sick.
Will Foster was sick when it became convenient for him to be sick, i.e. his defense in this case.
He wouldn't want to walk on these feet.
Whether you believe Foster smoked marijuana for pain or for pleasure, whether he has arthritis or not,
does Foster really deserve a 93-year sentence?
Does the punishment fit the crime?
Will Foster received a 93-year sentence.
There are killers, rapists, child molesters serving a lot less time.
Right. And I've prosecuted killers, rapists, and child molesters and gotten less than 92 years.
Will Foster had an option to take a plea negotiation.
He did not. So we went to trial.
Will Foster has 93 years because Will Foster asked for 93 years.
Is that fair? Because he didn't take the deal that you offered him.
At some point, the games have to end. We enter into plea negotiations the day of trial.
And Foster might have been out in four years.
But instead, he went to trial, he says, to preserve his right to appeal.
Prosecutor Brian Crane says by doing so, Foster placed his fate in the hands of his peers.
The judge did not set punishment. The state did not set punishment.
Twelve people who were citizens of Tulsa County made the determination that that kind of activity by Will Foster was not going to be tolerated.
The jury threw the book at Foster.
But just last month, an appeals court wrote another chapter.
This sentence shocks our conscience, the judges said, and reduced his term from 93 years to 20.
And thanks to a recent change in state law, he is now eligible for parole.
If Foster leaves prison, will he smoke marijuana again? We're not sure he ever quit.
Pot can be got here in prison.
So you smoked a couple of joints today before this interview?
Not today.
Are you still smoking pot here in prison?
My brother and I answered that question.
Are you pleading the fifth here?
Pleading the fifth. But you can get marijuana. You can get any drug you want here.
Last month, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommended Foster be paroled.
The governor will make the final decision within 90 days.
Still ahead, one family struggling to cope after the crash of TWA 800.
He said, Anne, I don't want to alarm you, but there's been a crash.
And right then, I sank to my knees and I knew.
Can her grief help the families of the Swiss Air victims?
Music.
Coming to James in 4, 3, 2, 1.
End of the 2, cue James.
Now the Dateline timeline. All the following events happened during this the first week of September.
You know what year it was.
Chris Evert retired from pro tennis.
The Lexus first hit the market at 37.5.
This is where you separate them into boys.
John Candy was Uncle Buck.
I got you now.
I took a twist of the batter in my DVDs.
On TV, DVDs got the hard sell.
And Gloria Estefan had a hit single.
I don't want to lose you now.
We're gonna get through somehow.
All right, what year was it?
1988, 1989, or 1990?
The answer when Dateline continues.
Music.
So what year was it?
Evert was out.
Candy was bucked.
And Don't Wanna Lose You was a hit.
It all happened the first week of September, 1989.
Dateline, winner of 1997 News Emmys for outstanding coverage of a breaking story,
outstanding investigative story, and outstanding news interview continues.
Now from Studio 3B, Jane Pauling.
229 people board a plane.
Within an hour of takeoff, they all perish.
There's no answer to the question why,
but their loved ones will be grappling with it for months and years to come.
Perhaps no one understands this better than the family shattered after the crash of TWA 800,
another flight that left Kennedy Airport and ended tragically in the Atlantic Ocean.
Now one woman's journey, and the turns her life has taken since we first brought you this story last summer.
Here's Sarah James.
Of course I wish I had gone with them.
And a lot of times I think it would be so much easier if we'd all crashed.
At least you all would have been together.
Anne Allen's family loved being together, especially on vacation.
But in the summer of 1996, a fateful delay split them apart.
Anne's husband and eldest child boarded TWA Flight 800 on July 17th,
a decision she would second-guess countless times in the years to come.
You go back over in your mind and replay things almost every day, and you think about them every day.
Before the crash, Anne quite simply had a wonderful life.
Three vivacious teenagers, an impressive house in an Atlanta suburb,
and a husband she adored, Lamar, 49 years old, a successful entrepreneur.
He was invincible. Nothing could ever happen to him.
He was just like always took care of us, the perfect provider, the perfect husband.
The Allens loved to travel, and in the summer of 1996 had planned a holiday in Paris.
But the most significant element of that trip was the timing.
Lamar feared possible terrorism at the Atlanta Olympics,
and was determined to get his family out of town to protect them.
They were all booked on a flight on July 16th,
but at the last minute Lamar remained behind one day to close a major business deal.
Master Allen.
16-year-old Ashton stayed, too.
But in a moment in which only philosophers can find meaning,
the thousands of tiny threads that held their family together were torn apart.
Ten miles off the shore of Long Island in New York tonight,
TWA, a 747 Flight 800 from JFK to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris,
apparently exploded in midair. No survivors yet.
All 230 people aboard TWA Flight 800 had perished.
Anne and her two younger children, already in Paris,
had no idea there had been a catastrophe until one of her husband's business associates called the hotel.
And he said, Anne, I don't want to alarm you, but there's been a crash.
And right then I sank to my knees and I knew.
Knew, and yet could not help but hold onto the slim hope that there had been some mistake.
Bizarre as it might seem, Anne took the children sightseeing.
We just wanted to stay outside the hotel all day because we thought if we did,
if we went back to the room they might be there, but they might not have gotten on that flight.
Psychologist Henry Sidon has studied the spectrum of grief and healing.
And while he hasn't met the Allens, he told us Anne's impulse to get out of her Paris hotel room made perfect sense.
Think of it as the mind protecting itself from something that is going to rip it apart.
The whole story of a life is suddenly in a moment rendered a lie.
Three weeks after the crash, on August 11th, the family held a funeral service for Lamar and Ashton.
Lamar's body was one of the first recovered, along with him his wedding band and watch still ticking.
But Ashton had not been found. His was an empty casket.
When they found my husband it was good because you could have that proper, you know, goodbye.
With Ashton we don't have that yet. So we're still praying that they find Ashton.
Six weeks after the crash, Anne was learning how powerful shock could be.
In spite of the magnitude of her loss, she was unable to cry.
People say, well, I haven't seen Anne cry yet, like you're not upset.
I told somebody I'm afraid if I start crying I'll probably never stop.
Four months later, on December 3rd, Anne and her daughter Amberly boarded an airplane for the first time since their flight home from Paris.
We're going up to the service for that flight 800.
TWA had brought the family to New York for a private memorial service to remember those 15 victims whose bodies had never been found.
The youngest of them, 16-year-old Ashton.
These past four months we have thought every day of 230 people.
To the family's frustration, there was still no official cause for the crash.
News reports had shown workers inside this hanger piecing together the jet like a mammoth jigsaw puzzle.
And while the family knew it could be traumatic, they wanted to view the wreckage.
Seidon says there's good reason for that.
I think people have to make things vivid for themselves.
It's important to give ourselves an image so that we can hang on to the reality of the fact that this has actually happened.
Otherwise it's just a kind of weird idea that somebody who's supposed to be here isn't here.
The family said they found the site of the shattered plane strangely comforting.
To me it was helpful. It did show that it was a tremendous force, that it happened quickly, that they didn't really suffer.
Investigators had given Lamar's father a box that contained his son's shaving kit.
But Henry Allen wanted something even more personal, his grandson.
We still have hope that Ashton will be coming home.
Meanwhile, the search continued for the missing piece that might explain why flight 800 had exploded.
In February, investigators identified the remains of one more passenger.
It wasn't Ashton.
Ann did receive his wallet found by a commercial fisherman.
Inside, the driver's license he'd had for just seven months, a Bible study card, and his high school ID, all silent testament to a lost future.
When you see a death certificate and you think, gosh, that's my son, he was only 16.
It hits you all over again and you get that feeling like you were kicked in the stomach and you're just like,
sometimes you just sit on the floor and you just can't move.
And she tormented herself with the what ifs.
What if she had said or done something different? Would Lamar and Ashton still be alive?
Lamar did say, well, we could all go together, and I say, well, no, you need to stay behind and close this deal.
And what if they'd flown another airline? The reason they'd taken flight 800 was because of Ann.
For 17 years, she'd worked as a flight attendant, and her employer had been none other than TWA.
What's more, Ann had regularly flown the New York to Paris route.
You're angry at TWA, thinking, why do they let these jets fly around so long if they're 30 years old?
You're angry at the FAA. Why don't they do something? You know, they can.
You're angry at just life in itself. You're angry at God.
And for a long time, you're angry at God. I couldn't pray for a while. You know, it's too angry to pray.
Since the crash, Ann had avoided Ashton's room, so full of reminders of the boy he'd once been, the man he would never become.
The car he'll never drive, the dates he'll never have, he'll never make love on a rainy afternoon, you know, he'll never hold a baby in his arms.
You know, I'll never see his grandchildren. That, that to me is really difficult, that he will not experience any of that.
And she still couldn't bring herself to empty Lamar's closet.
Sometimes I'll just wear his bathrobe around or his shirts and sweaters because it's kind of like a hug.
Ann had always found comfort at the piano, but she'd never kept a journal, until now.
She discovered that writing somehow helped her hold on to Lamar and Ashton.
She recorded in minute detail what had happened before the trip to Paris.
I've told Ashton he must wear his black leather jacket, which he did.
He's 16 and he looks so handsome in that jacket.
Look how cool I am!
With those perfect white teeth, rye grin, high cheekbones and debonair mannerisms of his, he will break many a heart.
How much a part of the difficulty is that? You leave, you expect to see them, just 48 hours later.
Stunned.
Yeah. You think of everything you said or you didn't say or that you would have liked to have said.
What would you say to Ashton that you didn't get to say?
Oh, gosh, just how much I loved him.
Yeah, no. I wish I were with him.
You're here because you're survivors.
Ten months after the crash, we found Ann in a place she had never expected to be, a grief counseling session.
I started crying because I knew that my son would never run into my wife's in my arms again.
Not only had she joined the group, she actually organized it.
I'm no longer with the cheerleader moms. I mean, you know, who cares?
Ann was fighting feelings of guilt about Ashton's death because he'd been frightened by a plane crash shortly before their trip.
He said, I don't really want to end up like those people on value jet.
And I said, oh, Ashton, you're not going to end up like those people on value jet.
He said, well, I just don't want to end up like them. And we had no idea how fulfilling that prophecy would be.
Although 95 percent of the plane had now been recovered, investigators still didn't know what caused the explosion.
Lamar and Ashton had been seated just under the N in trans, side by side, in row 16.
Eleven days before the one year anniversary of the crash and couldn't help but wonder, had they been conscious of what was happening?
And if so, for how long?
Oh, that realization that you've been hit, that you're going down, that you're not going to make it.
And you do wonder what goes through their minds. And, you know, I'm sure they were holding on to each other.
In a tragic coincidence, two women killed in the Swiss air crash had attended the same Baptist church in Atlanta that Lamar and Ashton Allen did.
Now let's take a look at a very special story we're working on for Dateline Monday.
They were a world away from home and the unthinkable happened.
I just stood there and I thought, oh my God, the ship's sinking.
A ferry packed with hundreds of terrified people. How did these three get out alive?
I knew I could swim. That was really the least of my worries.
Three Dateline survivors you'll never forget.
It was like there was some sort of struggle going on. Somebody wanted to try and kill us and somebody wanted to save us.
The story.