The second-deadliest plane crash in American history took place just two months after 9/11, when American Airlines Flight 587 to Santo Domingo plummeted almost immediately after taking off from JFK, killing 265 passengers, crew members, and people on the ground. Ten years later, despite the magnitude of this disaster, it has been largely forgotten, overshadowed by the immensity of 9/11.

But for family and neighbors of the victims, the crash is still a visceral wound, and closure remains elusive. "It doesn't matter how many anniversaries pass by," says New York City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez of Washington Heights, one of the neighborhoods most affected by the crash. "No one but the family members will be able to understand how hard it was that day and how hard it will continue to be."

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Robert Benzon dreaded going back to New York. The 17-year veteran of the National Transportation Safety Board, summoned from Washington to investigate the crash, was somewhat relieved to see the vertical stabilizer fin of the doomed airplane being pulled out of Jamaica Bay as he and his team drove to the site. He hoped this ruled out what he and many others were already fearing: terrorism. Again?

But Benzon couldn't shake the thought. He had just been in New York just one month before, digging through the rubble of what was the World Trade Center looking for flight recorders that would never be found from planes that had been used as missiles. And now, the investigation of another airplane catastrophe awaited him.

For Benzon and his team, the numbers didn't add up. American Airlines Flight 587's three-and-a-half-hour trip to Santo Domingo ended only two-and-a-half minutes and four miles southwest from its takeoff. The National Weather Service had reported blue skies with 10 miles of visibility . Hundreds of eyewitnesses gave accounts of the burning engines separating from the plane and other explosions that showered chunks of metal onto a five-block radius of Belle Harbor.

Benzon had been a lead investigator in several high profile air crashes, including the 1996 TWA Flight 800 crash that had killed 230 people off the coast of Long Island. But the Flight 587 disaster was especially difficult to investigate.

"Usually we can section off an accident scene, but there were thousands of people from all over the neighborhood and the city, coming to see what happened," Benzon says. "A lot of firefighters and police guys living there were coming up to me saying, 'People from almost every few blocks around here lost somebody on 9/11, and now this.'"

Something remained the same for Benzon: the stench. "All scenes smell like the same mix of pungent, burned material: jet fuel, hydraulic fluid, and of course human smells always come from the wreckage," Benzon says. "In this case, the fire was so bad that the deceased were barely recognizable as human beings."