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When Flight 800 crashed on July 17, 1996, taking the lives of 21 people from the small borough of Montoursville, the community was thrust onto the national stage. News outlets from across the country arrived, overwhelming residents and intruding on their grief.
Messages of sympathy poured in to try to console the families and friends of those lost in the tragedy. Amongst those offerings was a teddy bear, with the message attached saying that it had been sent to Oklahoma City after the bombing of the federal building in 1995. "It was meant to comfort and heal," the note said. "I now send him to you to continue his job."
Erika Grotto, daughter of Charlie and Vicki Enigk, remembers that bear and for some unexplained reason it piqued her interest. Grotto, who currently lives in Illinois, wondered where it had originally come from and what was the story behind its arrival in Montoursville.
Her journey of discovering more about the bear and how people cope with grief after a life-changing event led her to put her findings in a podcast, "Survived By," which will be available July 17. The first episode will feature interviews with people connected to Montoursville sharing their experiences in dealing with the tragedy.
Like so many people in Montoursville, those days following the crash are vivid in Grotto's memory.
In 1996, she had just graduated from Montoursville Area High School when her mother, who had been watching the news on television, told her about a plane crashing. Details of who was on board had not been released at that point.
"There was no information about who was on the flight. I had no idea that there was a connection," Grotto said.
"I remember she (her mom) kept coming into the kitchen and saying, 'they're saying this about this flight and they're saying this about this flight' and I remember thinking it was so odd. Why is she talking to me so much about this," Grotto said.
It wasn't until the morning after the crash that someone called her family and told them that the members of the French Club and their chaperones had been on the plane that had gone down.
I was probably the last person in Montoursville to find out," she said.
"It was just so shocking at first. The first day I was just kind of in a daze watching the news," she said.
Admitting that at 17 she was very naive, Grotto said, "I didn't realize how big this all was -- I had no idea," she said.
Like most of the town, Grotto attended the vigil that was held in the high school gym the day after the crash.
"I remember walking in. There were cameras everywhere and it was so weird and I remember going 'I don't want to be a part of this story. I don't want people taking my picture.' It just felt so invasive and so wrong and so strange," she said.
One of her classmates, who had lost her best friend, ran up and hugged Grotto when she entered the gym.
"I had no idea. I still didn't know who all had been on the plane," she said.
"I think it was at that moment that I really started to get that this was so much bigger than our school. This was so much bigger than the kids themselves. This was a community tragedy. It was something that would shape my entire life," she said.
With a small community like Montoursville, everyone in some way was connected to the people on the airplane.
"When you grow up in a small town, you know everybody," she said.
Grotto can't pinpoint the moment she first encountered the bear.
As the note attached to the bear indicated, it had come from Oklahoma City following the bombing at the Federal Building there.
"I remember that happening, but I was 16 at the time and it was a new story to me. It was something terrible that happened to people who lived far away. I think I reacted as 'oh that's really terrible' and then I went on about my day," she said.
Grotto admitted that she wasn't sure when she actually noticed the bear that had been sent and the note attached.
"When I saw it, I remembered the bombing and it was like wow, these people who went through this horrible thing feel some kind of kinship with us because we went through something horrible. It just kind of struck me that someone who had been through a tragedy was thinking of our town," she said.
"That was one of those times where I realized this was bigger than one town," she said,
Three years later, the bear traveled to Columbine High School in Colorado, the site of a mass school shooting.
After speaking with various people and learning how they coped with life-altering situations, Grotto feels that the bear symbolizes people coming together to share their grief.
When 16 students were killed in a plane crash in Germany in 2015, people from Montoursville, including Grotto, were invited to send letters to the families. They also sent a teddy bear.
"This idea of coming together. Now Montoursville is part of that, I think," she said.
"It started out as trying to follow the places that this bear had been, and try to find out where it is now. But I quickly realized it's about more than just an object that is sent from one place to another because on every stop, I heard from people who had people who had reached out to them from around the world, from other places that had gone through tragedies like theirs," she said.
"I interviewed Frank DeAngelis, the former principal of Columbine. And he told me right after he got a phone call from a high school principal in Kentucky, who had been through a school shooting and he said, 'You don't know what you need, but here's my name. Here's my number. Call me when you know what you need.'" Grotto said.
In her research, she learned that there is a group of high school principals who have gone through school violence and have formed a group to help others as they share their experiences.
"Those, I think, are the kinds of things that matter. It's not about a stuffed bear," she said.
In preparing for her podcast, Grotto did finally learn where the idea of offering a stuffed bear to someone in the midst of a traumatic situation came from. Brenda Edgar, whose husband Jim had been governor of Illinois in the 1990s, had partnered with Marshall Fields for the bears.
For every bear sold at the store, a bear would be donated to the Department of Children and Family Services to be given to a child who was being removed from their home in order to comfort them. The story that Grotto had found in her research was that when the bombing in Oklahoma occurred, Brenda Edgar had contacted the governor of Oklahoma's wife and said that she wanted to send bears for the memorial service.
"Brenda Edgar had arranged for these bears to be sent to Oklahoma City. They were handed out at a memorial that was held four days after the bombing. And they were handed out as people walked in to victims families and to survivors. If you look at photos, there are people in the audience holding the bears. And if you watch the video, you'll see that President Clinton and Hillary Clinton came to the memorial. And there's a man sitting next to President Clinton holding a bear with one arm and holding Bill Clinton's hand with the other," Grotto said.
"It's just really powerful... I saw these pictures and I just couldn't believe the answer of where this bear came from had been there the whole time. I had just never seen it. So one of those people sent their bear to Montoursville and that's the other thing I would love to know. I would love to know what moved them...just a little over a year later, one person not only gave up their bear but sent it to a town that they had probably never even visited. They probably knew nothing about us other than what they saw on the news and that is really amazing to me," she said.
So where is the bear now?
The last she had heard, Grotto said in 2001, it had been sent to a school in California.