WHEN NEW YORK CITY BUREAU CHIEF Kristen Kelch first heard the terrible news about TWA Flight 800, she was at her home in Brooklyn Heights, about 70 miles from the crash site. "I knew it was going to be an extraordinary story, and a difficult one to report," she says. Kelch, who came to PEOPLE last September from New York Newsday, had previously edited stories on a terrorist tragedy: the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. She now had to give 36 correspondents across the country the difficult task of talking to bereaved families and friends. Writer-reporter Lisa Greissinger profiled two families in New York City, and correspondent Ron Arias and stringer Anthony Cabrera went to Montoursville, Pa., the small town where the high school French club had lost 16 students and five adult chaperones in the disaster. "Once the shock is over," Kelch says, "a lot of people will decide that talking about the loved one is a way to make sure their child, husband or wife has a legacy—and is not just a name on a passenger list."
Once in Montoursville, Arias and Cabrera began by meeting townspeople and later received calls from residents who wanted to talk about their deceased friends and classmates. At Kennedy Airport, meanwhile, special correspondent Anne Longley introduced herself to the mother of an 11-year-old victim. "Oh, my name is Anne, too," said the woman, Ann Dwyer, of New River, Ariz., whose daughter Larkyn had died in the crash. Longley, who also has an 11-year-old, told her, "I can't imagine what you're going through." Three days later, when Dwyer felt she was ready to discuss her loss, she and her husband gave Longley an interview.
"There's nothing harder than going where someone's just lost a child," says Kelch, who, with her husband, Frank Spain, a New York City housing administrator, has a 5-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. "People give us their trust in situations such as this one, and we try to return their trust by handling their stories with dignity and compassion."
Complementing the story in this issue on TWA Flight 800 is a commemorative web page posted on PEOPLE Online. Readers who wish to send victims' families Internet messages of support can do so at http://www.people.com. We'll see that they're forwarded to the right place.
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