Heaven-bound passenger

National | A family perseveres in faith in young son's death over the Atlantic | Bob Jones

On a windswept New York beach last Sunday, a little group gathered to stare into the gray Atlantic and read from a fatigue-bound New Testament. Having just completed six weeks' ROTC training, Matthew Alexander had left his Army-issue Bible back home in Florence, S.C., while he headed to Marseilles, France, for a month of mission work.

He never made it. His Paris-bound flight, TWA 800, exploded in mid-air and plummeted into the ocean off Long Island 17 minutes after taking off from Kennedy Airport on July 17. Matthew, 20, died in the crash, along with all 229 others on board.

As government experts labored to reconstruct the shattered aircraft, surviving families of the passengers were left to do the same with their lives. For some, that meant lashing out at the airline, the FAA, unknown terrorists, even the coroner in charge of identifying the bodies. For nearly all, it meant a

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