The deaths that broke Cape Cod's heart: Remembering the 1999 Kennedy plane crash
Cape Cod Times / Jul 16 2024 (anniversary) (exerpts)
On July 17, 1999, items started washing ashore on Martha's Vineyard beaches that told a story of tragedy — not of some long-forgotten shipwreck with unknown seafarers lost at sea, but rather tidbits attached to the behind-the-scenes lives of an iconic family embraced by many as "American royalty."
A suitcase, a prescription bottle, a checkbook, registration papers for a single-engine Piper Saratoga private aircraft encased in a plastic sleeve.
It has been a quarter of a century since that six-seat airplane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean about 7.5 miles southwest of the Vineyard, killing 38-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, 33, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, 34, late on a Friday night with haze enveloping the Islands and the waters off Point Judith and the South Coast. The power couple was going to drop off Lauren Bessette at the Vineyard before continuing on to Hyannis to attend the wedding of JFK Jr.'s cousin, Rory Kennedy, to Mark Bailey at the Kennedy compound.
The small debris washing ashore the next day at Philbin and Moshup beaches was the first material indication that something had gone terribly wrong with the flight — ironically, the registration papers that connected the plane to the son of the late President John F. Kennedy came to rest, soggy but intact, on the Kennedy family's own 400-acre beachfront property off Moshup Trail in Aquinnah.
—
A Kennedy wedding celebration turned 'somber'
Retired Barnstable Police Sgt. Sean Sweeney, a 39-year veteran of the force, was working a wedding security detail at the Kennedy compound that morning, July 17, 1999. At the time, he'd been working in the department for 20 years and he'd undertaken countless details for the Kennedys. He knew many of them on a personal level and he'd even spent time working out in the police department's fitness room with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was married to JFK's niece, Maria Shriver.
"Everything that morning was going along smooth. I was posted at the top of the driveway and I remember Arnold walking up the driveway and saying to me, 'We're going to be a little delayed,' but it was nothing alarming at the time. John Jr. was late," Sweeney recalled. "And then, as we were standing there talking, word filtered in that something had gone wrong with John's plane."
In short order the joyous atmosphere "really changed, and everything became somber," he said. The wedding was called off and everyone seemed to be holding their collective breath as answers as to what had happened were sought.
It would be three days before the family lowered the flag at the compound to half-staff in formal acknowledgement of their loss.
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2024/07/16/john-f-kennedy-jr-plane-crash-25th-anniversary-hyannis-carolyn-lauren-bessette-marthas-vineyard/74216223007/