NY1 VIDEO: For many New Yorkers, July 1996 was spent following increasingly conflicting reports regarding TWA Flight 800, which exploded and crashed off the coast of Long Island that month shortly after leaving JFK, killing 230 people. NY1's Melissa Russo followed the story closely in the weeks after the tragedy and filed this report.

NY1 FOLLOW-UP: In the end, all remains of the 230 victims aboard Flight 800 were recovered and identified. Nearly all of the plane itself was found, too, which accident investigators painstakingly reconstructed in order to determine a cause for the crash. Four years later, they did, placing blame officially on an explosion caused by a spark in an empty fuel tank.