40th Anniversary of Kent State Riots

  

"I wanted to show you the attached photo from Kent from May 4. I am somewhere in the far upper right, long dark hair and a blue jean jacket, like most everyone else, and cannot be seen in the photo. The National Guard were massed near the burned out ROTC building below while the students were gathering around the bell on "the hill" about noon.  I was on my way to stratigraphy and stayed on the upper edge of the crowd watching.

First a Guard jeep drove by with 2 soldiers and an officer with a bull horn saying "You must disperse.  This gathering is illegal. You will be arrested if you do not leave." The campus was under martial law at the time. The soldiers then fixed bayonets to their rifles and put on gas masks. They fired the first rounds of tear gas grenades into us and began marching toward us.  The photo shows the arcing grenades coming in - I was thinking I might get hit on the head by one of the canisters and moved back and into the cover of some trees to the right of the photo. Several students had brought heavy gloves and ran out, grabbed the tear gas canisters and lobbed them back toward the soldiers.

As I was moving to get out of the way to the right, the main body of students moved to the left onto the practice football field in front of Taylor Hall followed by the soldiers.  That put me behind the students and the soldiers.  Some students continued to throw rocks and return tear gas as it was lobbed in.  As the soldiers started to move back toward the top of the hill and now toward me, they suddenly turned, knelt  and began firing into the crowd. I watched Jeff Miller seemingly lifted into the air in slow motion and flipped over.  He had been shot in the head, certainly died instantly and lay in the road.  The dead and wounded were scattered randomly.

The soldiers turned and moved back to their strong point near there original positions at the ROTC building. The sirens began and the first ambulance arrived.  But instead of leaving, students again began to gather and the crowd was increasing.  It was chaos.  The students were split - some arguing to attack the soldiers while others argued no.  I mostly remember Glenn Frank - a geology professor who I knew well and was very respected on campus - was begging the students to disburse. He was pleading with us to get out of there, that the soldiers would shoot again. He had borrowed a bull horn from the military and was crying as I recall. Eventually the crowd began to disburse.

Within 30 minutes, military helicopters and police cars with loudspeakers began to order everyone off campus immediately.  Just leave anyway you could without anything.  I was lucky that I had a car.  Most others had to simply walk.  I was stopped at a check point on my way out of town, ordered out of my car with a shotgun pointed at me by a State trooper, while I was frisked and my car searched.  The initial reports were that the students opened fire on the soldiers, so they were desperate to find armed students.  That turned out never to be true.

I was never afraid that day."