Peggy Otenasek's daughter, Anne, a graduate of Notre Dame Prep and a student at what was then Western Maryland College, was studying abroad and had boarded the London-New York flight on her way home for Christmas.
"I got up early this morning and turned on the television, and that was the first thing I saw, that image of the plane and the town of Lockerbie, and it was a very rude awakening," said Otenasek, who lives in Baltimore.
The bomb, hidden in a boom box and wrapped in clothing in a suitcase, exploded over land because the plane's departure was delayed - instead of over sea, as it was apparently intended and where all evidence would have disappeared.
The cockpit broke apart from the fuselage, as did the wing sections, which descended on Lockerbie in a fireball that vaporized several houses and damaged 21 more so badly they had to be demolished.
Scots searched an area estimated at 850 square miles and carefully collected the belongings of those who died - including 35 Syracuse University students - cleaning them and preserving them and returning them to the surviving family members.
Among the items returned to Severna Park, where Miriam had been a talented and energetic member of the theater community, were soaked and faded journals written by the drama major.
"The sky was bluer today, the sun was yellower today. And the whole of the earth seemed to be rejoicing in its own perfection." That was an entry she made just days before she died.
Rosemary Mild said years later that she first felt guilty that she did not know her daughter so carefully recorded her interior life. Then she was stunned by the depth and maturity of the writing.
So, in 1999, she published "Miriam's Gift," a recollection of her daughter's short life and a celebration of her unfulfilled promise.
She plans a revised edition of the book, which will include her impressions watching the trial of al-Megrahi at The Hague, Netherlands, in 2001. There she and her husband sat behind thick Plexiglas walls and watched the evidence presented in what Larry Mild described as "a meticulous trial."
"The banality of evil," said Rosemary Mild, quoting the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who escaped the Holocaust. "That's what struck me. The two men looked so ordinary," she said, still sounding astonished.
Stephanie Bernstein, 58, a Bethesda rabbi, whose husband, Michael, an attorney, was killed in the attack, worries that releasing al-Megrahi is a violation of both a biblical sense of justice and a promise made by the court system that convicted him.
