Snapshots Of Flight 800 Victims -- Passengers Included Vacationers

A mother and her 9-year-old son on vacation, a couple headed to Paris for their fifth wedding anniversary, Italian citizens who were placed on an alternate flight to get home: These are some of the stories of the people who were aboard TWA Flight 800 - and the loved ones left behind.

Amy and Kyle Miller, both 29, gave the Paris trip to each other as a fifth wedding anniversary gift.

In France, the young marrieds from Tamaqua, Pa., planned to see an exchange student who stayed with her family 11 years ago, said her father, Monty Siekerman.

Siekerman said he finds comfort in family, friends and knowing his daughter and son-in-law are in heaven.

"We woke up to a sunrise, but they woke up to a sunrise many more times glorious. We know where they are and we will see them again," he said.

Siekerman and his wife, Carole, last saw their daughter 10 days ago. He last spoke to her a few hours before she boarded the jet.

"She was excited about it and said, `We'll call you when we get in, Dad,"' he said.

Like millions who watched the disaster unfold before them on television, "Good Morning America" host Joan Lunden hoped for a miracle - in vain.

Her lifelong friend Jed Johnson, an interior designer from New York, was on the jetliner bound for Paris.

"This grief added on with the suspense makes it even worse," she said during the show.

Wary from the uncertainty, a few minutes later she announced that Johnson's family in California had learned their son was indeed on the jet.

In St. Louis, Pat Marion said her 42-year-old daughter, Patricia Anderson, and her husband, J. Edward Anderson, 49, were heading to Paris to meet another couple for a vacation in Italy.

"I'm sitting here like a zombie," Mrs. Marion said. "My husband walked down the hall last night and asked me what Patty's flight number was ... I said it was 800. He said, `It just blew up in the air.'

"I haven't been the same since," she said.

A veteran flier, a loving family man: TWA Flight Engineer Richard Campbell leaves a wife and two boys, ages 14 and 16.

Campbell logged 18,527 hours of total flying time with TWA since he was hired in 1966.

Three years ago, the family moved back from California to Ridgefield, Conn., the town that was home to the Campbells for 15 years in all.

Capt. William Mayr, a TWA pilot who was hired about the same time as Campbell, was among the dozens of friends who gathered at the family's home comforting his wife and sons.

"He was just a super guy, a great professional pilot. He worked really hard, loved his kids and his wife. He was a great father and husband."

In Washington, Associated Press editor John Wilson learned from a TV newscast that his cousin, Steve Snyder, was Flight 800's captain.

Snyder, of Stratford, Conn., had logged 17,263 flight hours with TWA. He was a man of dashing good looks and courtly manners, a golf devotee but with precious little time to socialize, his neighbors said.

"You couldn't meet a more lovely man," said Dawn Kusznir, manager of the golf course at the Stratford condominium complex where Snyder lived.

"I just heard this and said, `Oh please, this can't be true," she said.