‘We’ve Learned There Is No Formula for Grieving’

The long wait for justice was about to end, and the families of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 braced themselves for the worst. Taking his seat in the courtroom, Bruce Smith said he was “pretty confident” there would be an acquittal of the two Libyans on trial for the murder of 270 people, including his wife, Ingrid.

Nearby, Helen Engelhardt Hawkins worried that the judges would find reasonable doubt in the case against those accused of killing her husband, Anthony.

Smith and Engelhardt were among the dozens of family members whose sharp gasps filled the gallery Wednesday as the presiding judge, Lord Sutherland, pronounced the first verdict: guilty. Stunned, they struggled to keep their emotions in check as they passed boxes of tissues and hugged one another.

Another gasp of surprise spread through the room with the second verdict: not guilty. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, was so overcome by his feelings that he collapsed and had to be carried out.

The families of the victims are unwilling members of a club whose statistics chief prosecutor Colin Boyd read in court Wednesday: More than 400 parents lost sons or daughters in the bombing; 46 parents lost an only child; 65 women were widowed; 11 men lost wives; more than 140 children lost a parent; seven children lost both parents.

From Southern California to New York to the courtroom here in the Netherlands, the reactions to the conviction of Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and acquittal of Lamen Khalifa Fhimah were as diverse as the families themselves.

Smith, a retired Pan Am pilot living on a boat in the Bahamas, left the courtroom yearning for a harsher punishment than Megrahi’s life sentence with the possibility of parole after 20 years: “This should have been heard in an American court with American laws with a death sentence,” he said.

“I hope he rots in hell,” Susan Lowenstein, whose son died in the explosion, told a crush of reporters outside the courtroom.

In New York, about 90 relatives gathered inside a federal building in the early-morning hours to watch the verdicts on closed-circuit television. Bert Ammerman, whose brother Tom left behind a wife and two young daughters when the plane blew up, said the room brimmed with 12 years’ worth of tension as they watched the judges walk into the court. But as they waited in the heavy silence of the dark room, the downlink lost its sound and they were unable to hear the verdicts. A phone call from the Netherlands delivered the news.

“I’m very satisfied,” Ammerman said. “We overcame a lot to get this trial to happen.”

For five years, Ammerman has led the political efforts of the group Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, but he said that with Wednesday’s verdicts, he will return to “normal life”--as normal as it can be.

“Today I can walk away knowing I did everything I could in my brother’s name,” he said. “One thing we’ve learned is that there is no formula for grieving. We all have our different points of closure.”

For Eileen and Bob Monetti, a New Jersey couple who lost their 20-year-old son, Rick, that point hasn’t come yet.

“I feel like the coach of the team that has won the first playoff game. It’s the first hurdle, but there are more to come,” Bob Monetti said. They have been lobbying U.S. presidents since Ronald Reagan to ensure that their son’s killers faced justice, and on Wednesday they met with Justice Department officials to urge that U.S. sanctions against Libya continue.

The next step is a civil case brought against Libya in New York, and the Monettis will watch that trial as closely as the criminal case in the Netherlands.

“I want to follow this absolutely to the end,” Bob Monetti said.

Relatives of Southern California victims absorbed the verdicts from a farther remove, both physically and, for some, emotionally. Robert Gannon, an Orange County assistant district attorney whose 34-year-old brother, Matthew, was killed, heard the news when he turned on the radio Wednesday morning.

While gratifying, he said, the verdicts change nothing.

“I personally did not have a lot psychologically invested in this verdict,” said Gannon, 56, adding that he doubts his family will join the pending lawsuit against Libya. “In the last analysis, the losses for all the families are still there, and my brother Matthew is never very far from our thoughts.”

Barbara Richardson of Newport Beach lost her mother and two sisters. She, too, let the trial unfold from a distance, glad it was happening but trying not to let it dominate her life.

“I would have liked to have seen the mastermind on trial. I think these men were involved, but I think they were sort of low-level,” said Richardson, 58. “The thing for me is that this trial has helped keep it in the forefront so that it hasn’t slipped into the history books. . . . It should be remembered and feared, because this could happen again.”

Sharda Bhatia of Torrance, whose husband, Surinder, died in the blast, said she shook with joy and sadness when she heard the verdict on the morning news. She was still shaking Wednesday evening.

“Yesterday I was in my yoga class praying and asking God: ‘If they did do it, they should be punished. If they did not, let them go,’ ” Bhatia said. “This morning, I realize he heard my prayer.”

Bhatia, 54, said she didn’t have the strength to go to the trial.

The verdict “brought it all back,” she said. “I don’t think the pain gets any less.”

Her daughter, Kiran Khanna, 30, of Mountain View, Calif., said the ordeal won’t be over for her until Libyan leader Col. Moammar Kadafi is punished.

“To say there’s going to be closure is not possible,” she said. “Sanctions should remain against Libya until [Kadafi] makes some sort of compensation for the families.”

About 40 relatives gathered under tight security in Washington to watch the reading of the verdicts over closed-circuit TV, most of them fighting sleep to learn firsthand whether the men would be convicted.

As the guilty verdict was read, they erupted in cheers, only to fall into stunned silence moments later at the second verdict.

“I think most of us had resigned ourselves to either a not-guilty or not-proven verdict,” said Ted Reina, 68, of La Palma, whose 26-year-old daughter, Jocelyn, died in the explosion. “In all, we got more than we expected. There was just not enough evidence to prove both of them were involved. . . . We accept that, and we’re real happy with the guilty verdict.”

In the Camp Zeist courtroom in the Netherlands, European and American journalists who were gathered around Engelhardt also wanted to know if she felt “closure.”

Jet-lagged--she had arrived in the Netherlands from the United States on Wednesday morning--but adrenaline-fueled, she searched for words.

“Closure means everything has been resolved, but everything has not been resolved, like the people who were responsible for this--I don’t want Kadafi to be let off the hook as though he was not responsible, as though this was a rogue employee.

“He has been positioning himself to get back into everyone’s full graces. I would not like to see my government join in his PR campaign. I would like to see them honor us and those who were killed.”

She was philosophical after the verdicts.

“Justice is very important, and it is the only response to a crime. I identify with the people in Chile who are finally going to see some justice [with the trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet],” the Brooklyn resident said.

Engelhardt, whose son was 6 years old when his father died, said she used to ask herself whether she would support a death penalty for the defendants if it would somehow bring her husband back.

“But it doesn’t happen that way, so I don’t need his [Megrahi’s] death. I need him in prison. I need justice.”

Has she gotten justice?

“When my husband died 12 years ago,” she said, “I vowed to him I would fight to find out what happened. I have done the best I could.”

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Miller reported from the Netherlands and Farley from New York. Times staff writers Scott Martelle in Costa Mesa and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Los Angeles contributed to this report.