New film follows Port couple who lost child in Flight 103 bombing

PORT JERVIS — It has been more than 27 years since former Port Jervis residents Susan and Dan Cohen lost their only child, Theodora (“Theo”), in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Theo has, in fact, been dead longer than she was alive.

Susan Cohen calls Dec. 21, 1988, not only the worst day of her life, but the last day of her life. “I’m not the same person ... There is not a day that will ever go by that is not filled with what happened.”

Theo, a Syracuse University drama student, had turned 20 while spending a semester of study in London. She spoke with her parents on Dec. 19, two days before boarding the plane that was supposed to bring her home. She had bought her father a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat, she’d told him. “I miss you and I love you,” she’d said before hanging up.

Thirty-eight minutes into its flight from Heathrow to JFK in New York, Pan Am 103 exploded at 31,000 feet over rural Lockerbie, killing 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 villagers in their homes. The world would not know — not for years — the horrific truth of the bombing of Flight 103.

There were warnings of credible terrorist threats, specifically targeting Pan American World Airways within a two-week pre-Christmas period, but those warnings were never issued to the public. After investigators determined it was a bomb — hidden inside a Toshiba cassette recorder and transported in an unaccompanied hard-shell Samsonite suitcase — that caused the explosion, it would be 13 years before a lone Libyan terrorist was held accountable. After receiving a “life” sentence, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was released on “compassionate grounds” — he was suffering from prostate cancer — after just eight years. The bomber would return to Tripoli to live in freedom for three years until his death in 2012.

Megrahi’s release was subsequently linked to a back-door oil deal, the lifting of strict sanctions against Libya — and to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi himself. The government of Libya eventually paid $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of Pan Am 103 — $10 million for each victim. Susan and Dan Cohen accepted only half of that amount.

“We felt that we could only take the part that came from the Libyan Treasury,” said Cohen. “The second part of that deal was blood money.” It was tied, she said, to the lifting of United Nations sanctions against Libya.

Filmmaker Phil Furey has made a documentary about the aftermath of the bombing. “Since: The Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103,” which was shown recently at the Hoboken International Film Festival at Middletown’s Paramount Theatre. The film follows three sets of parents, including Susan and Dan Cohen, in the years since the loss of their children. Furey said he chose the Cohens because they are “outspoken, and angry, and embittered ... I love how honest they were about how this ruined their lives.”

“I wasn’t able to watch the film for a long time,” said Cohen, but when she shared a private screening with Furey at the Cohens’ home in Cape May Court House, N.J., she was “pleased” by what she saw. “He was true to us. I did not want anyone to soften our views, our anger ... he did not distort it.”

The Cohens have been, and continue to be, perhaps the most vocal activists among the Pan Am 103 families. They have incessantly castigated Pan Am, the U.S. and British governments, and dictator Gaddafi, who was murdered by his own people in 2011. Cohen maintains that with Gaddafi’s death came the only justice she was ever to receive.

For years, two cardboard boxes containing the remnants of Theo’s luggage sat unopened in the Cohen house on Elizabeth Street in Port Jervis. Eventually, a family friend went through the contents. Among the clothes — “some of them were burned to a crisp,” said Cohen — there was the deerstalker hat meant for Dan, along with Theo’s diary. “I didn’t keep her diary,” said Cohen. “It wasn’t written for my eyes. If she didn’t want me to read it when she was alive, I wasn’t going to read it when she was dead. I wouldn’t do that to her.”

“The issue is not how you respond to this gruesome thing,” said Cohen, emphatically. “The issue is that this gruesome thing should never have happened.”

Dan Cohen suffered a stroke seven years ago. Susan Cohen is using the settlement from Libya to pay for his care.