David Dornstein, a 1981 Cheltenham High School graduate, had dreams of becoming a great writer when he boarded the doomed Pan Am Flight 103 in London on December 21, 1988.
He was returning home from Israel where he had begun his first novel. Thirty-eight minutes after takeoff, a terrorist bomb ripped the plane apart over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 passengers.
According to The New York Times, Dornstein wrote in a college writing class “the first draft of a work he thought might be his ticket to immortality. It would be a fictional autobiography, the story of an unknown young writer who dies in a plane crash, leaving behind a cache of papers and notebooks that the narrator stitches together into the story of the writer’s life. Someone else, it turns out, lived to write that book.”
According to local historian Chuck Langerman, Dornstein graduated near the top of his class at Cheltenham High while earning three letters as a member of the school’s varsity tennis team. At Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island where he graduated in 1985, he was a student activist, fighting prejudice against blacks, gays, and women.
In 2006, his younger brother, Ken Dornstein, a 1987 Cheltenham graduate, wrote a memoir, “The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky“. The book traces Ken’s attempt to finally get to know and understand his older brother through research, interviews, and David’s own voluminous writings: letters, drafts, and innumerable spiral-bound notebooks filled with “(r)andom thoughts, poems, dream images, bizarre theories, pretend interviews, scalding self-critical passages and the outlines of impossibly grandiose projects.”
Ken, who is also a filmmaker, was featured by CNN in a 2015 article titled “Filmmaker’s search for ‘My Brother’s Bomber’ led to Lockerbie breakthrough“.
Brown University established posthumously the David Dornstein ’85 Artist Grant to provide resources for exceptional and unique projects that serve as a “next step” for graduating seniors or graduate students.
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Photo: Stephen Barry