‘I returned to Lockerbie after 35 years - one victim’s story has stayed with me all this time’

Even before the 1988 disaster, Lockerbie was a town I knew well, just 25 miles as the crow flies from my own home town in the Scottish Borders.

Lockerbie was my first assignment as a staff reporter for BBC radio, and I spent most of the next year in and around town, reporting on the ongoing criminal investigation and many other stories related to the tragedy.

Thirty-five years on, as I return to a town I haven't seen since then, it would be easy, probably obvious to tell you about the enormity of that disaster.

Of Sherwood Crescent, now rebuilt, where the Pan Am jet's fuel laden wings crashed to the ground, causing a massive explosion and crater, and killing 11 Lockerbie residents.

Or the story of Rosebank Crescent, where part of the main passenger cabin crashed into the terraces there, some of the victims still strapped to their airline seats.

Instead, I want to tell you about one of the young victims, an incredible individual - whose story touched me then, and still lives with me all these years later.

It’s the story, not just of an amazing young man, but of ‘The Picture’ - a photograph taken of him in the days before his death, and the spine-tingling account of how it found its way back into the possession of his family.

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Nick Vrenios was just 20 years old, the same age as me at the time of the bombing.

He was, by all accounts, a very talented photography student at Syracuse University in New York, one of 35 Syracuse students who perished on Pan Am flight 103.

He'd been on a tour of Europe with friends and like so many victims, was returning home for Christmas.

His mother Elizabeth still bursts with pride as she recounts many of Nick's qualities to me.

“He was shorter than anyone else, but mighty,” Elizabeth said.

“Everybody enjoyed being around him. He took chances. He was the first one to dive off the cliff. He was an adventurer.”

Nick’s brother Chris was only a year apart in age.

He remembers a talented musician, who wasn’t averse to making a bit of beer money.

“My brother had certain innate abilities,” Chris recalls.

“He could pick up something and just do it.

“My last conversation with my brother was Thanksgiving that year, and as I spoke with him, I remember him recounting that while he was in London, he would take his guitar and would go to a different part of London periodically and he would just find a place where he could sing.

“And he would get these very large crowds of people around him.

“I remember him telling me, you know l’m making hundreds of pounds an hour on the street, which for a 20 year old at the time, was pretty significant.

“And so in turn, what he would do with the money he was earning was to go back and to buy beer for all of his mates who stayed in the flat with him.”

WATCH HERE: Lockerbie 35th anniversary

In the days after the disaster, Chris travelled with his mother and father to Lockerbie, to help identify Nick’s personal belongings.

Elizabeth said that in a giant warehouse “They gathered all of the clothes and objects. Everything was black, everything was grey, filled with smoke, or burnt.”

Mrs Vrenios said she wanted to sift through the massive collection of photographs in the store, as she knew pictures were extremely important in her son’s life and he’d said his rucksack was full of photos and undeveloped negatives he’d taken while in Europe.

The family was brought a huge mound of photographs to look through.

Suddenly, one picture stuck out and caught Elizabeth’s eye.

While many others were badly singed and torn, this one image was in perfect condition.

It was a photograph of Nick, taken in the days before his death, sitting above the cloud base on the summit of a mountain, a bottle of whisky in one hand.

Chris was told by investigators that the photograph had somehow survived that force of the bomb blast and decompression as the aircraft ripped apart.

It was thrown out into the night sky, 31,000 feet into the air and drifted on the high altitude winds, until landing un damaged in a farmer’s field in North Northumbria, the opposite side of the country to Lockerbie.

Chris said: “The fact that this one piece of evidence was found so far from the rest of them, from the crash, and it had travelled high above in the atmosphere for several days, it’s kind of a testimony to who he was and his character.”

Elizabeth starts crying as she reflects on the enormous symbolism of Nick’s photo.

“The picture being perfect was to me a miracle, and the fact it was found so far away, it made all of us gasp when we saw it, and we started to cry.

“Even now, 35 years later, it gets to me.

“It was as if Nick was saying, I’m all right, I’m supposed to be here.”

Up at Dryfesdale cemetery, the site of the Lockerbie memorial, it's so incredibly moving to touch Nick's name, etched into the memorial stone, all these years later.

Thirty-five years which, for the rest of us, have been packed with life experiences.

Who knows what Nick Vrenios could have gone on to achieve.

From everything I've been told, he would have lived an amazing life.