BEN POST
I’m standing by the corner, and I watch this ragged group of guardsmen go past me up the hill. My first impulse was to follow them up the hill. But I thought because there were so many students at that point—there were a knot of students on the corner with me—I decided to turn and run through the building, because there was an exit at the very back of the building. So I ran through the back of the building, and as I ran through the door and got out on this little portico area, the guard turned and fired. They were maybe thirty yards away from me. Not real far. A student fell in front of me, and I was just flabbergasted. A group of students immediately surrounded this person who was wounded. I just don’t know what to do. I’m saying—what do you do with something like this? I asked somebody, “Who is it?” He said, “What does it matter who it is?”
JOE LEWIS
Later in court, I heard testimony that after I had been shot, and was convulsing on the ground, another guardsman shot me through the lower leg. When quizzed on the witness stand during our civil trial why he shot someone who apparently had already been shot, his defense for attempted murder was “Well, everybody else was shooting him.” That’s what he said.
JOHN FILO
I get the camera to my eye, and I said, Oh, there’s a guy pointing a rifle at me, I’ve got to get a picture of this, because no one’s going to believe it. This is crazy, they’re shooting blanks into the crowd, and that’s when I heard a bullet go by, and I went, Wait a minute. I see this guy’s gun go off, and immediately in front of me is a metal sculpture and the whole sculpture just goes clang and there’s this cloud of rust, and then on the tree right next to me a big chunk of bark goes off. It’s the same bullet. Clang, chhk. It was that quick. And you go, Oh shit, that’s live ammunition! And you just freeze, and the firing’s still going on, and you’re hearing whizzes, and people are wounded here, and there’s people wounded in front of me, and it seemed like forever.
Then I turned, and I literally took two giant steps down the hill, and I saw the body of Jeffrey Miller, and there was no one around, it was just a body in the street. He was literally pumping his last—it was like his neck was severed. I mean not completely, but the blood was just flowing. I said to myself, Why are you running now? It’s all over. I said, Yeah, but I know this person’s dead, and I’m going to stay here. He was not very far at all, about thirty feet.
I started shooting [pictures], and then this girl, out of the corner of my eye, runs up and kneels down beside him. I’m like, Oh, I’ve got to get a better angle. I sort of had him in profile. So I kept moving around, but I also knew I was running out of film. You’re sort of counting, like, Oh man, I’ve got maybe three or four frames left. You wanted to shoot this, because you saw this person over the body. Once again, the iconic images that you grew up with as a child, in church. Here we are, we’re looking at the pietà, except Christ isn’t on Mary’s lap. He’s fallen off her lap onto the ground. So you want to shoot this and you’re having this argument with yourself: Shoot the picture, don’t shoot the picture. Shoot the picture, don’t shoot the picture. As you’re having this argument, she lets out this scream. And there’s no debate anymore, you just sort of react to her movement. I shot that, shot another frame, and I was out of film on that roll.
Credit 19.4
Kent State student Mary Ann Vecchio screams as she kneels over the body of fellow student Jeffrey Miller (age twenty), who was shot in the head by the Ohio National Guard from 265 feet away and killed instantly. Miller, Allison Krause, Sandra Scheuer, and Bill Schroeder were killed on May 4, 1970. Kent State student photographer John Filo won the Pulitzer Prize for this photograph.
DEAN KAHLER
If you reach around with your arm, and you put it just below the center of your shoulder blade, that’s where the bullet hit me. I was on the ground. They were on top of the hill, shooting down the hill. I was ninety-two yards away, I think at that point in time. I was on the practice football field. I got hit, but the bullets are still coming. The bullets are still hitting the ground around me for another two or three or four seconds, but it seemed like an eternity. Of course, during the shooting, people were screaming. You could hear bullets hitting vehicles. You can hear bullets ricocheting off the ground. It was utter chaos. But then, when the shooting stopped, it got quiet for a few seconds, and then the screaming started all over again, but this time it had a much higher pitch to it. It had much more horror in its tone. Jeffrey Miller’s lying there with half his neck blown off. Sandy Scheuer’s lying there, waiting for death. Allison Krause is waiting to chat with death. People are lying on the ground, bleeding.
Me, I wasn’t bleeding. My bleeding was very minimal because I was bleeding internally. It hit my lung on my left side, but I didn’t bleed externally. But I couldn’t get up, and I was lying there, and people were gathering around me, and I asked, believe it or not, “Is there anybody here who’s got their first aid merit badge in Boy Scouts?” Yeah, four, five guys raised their hand. I say, “I need six people. I’m not going to die, right here, with my face in the grass. I want to be turned over.” You know, there is a way to do it. They do it today, and EMS does the exact same technique that I learned in Boy Scouts when I was in high school.
No guardsmen came to me at all. Actually, one of the students from the Black United Students came over to me. They told the black students to stay away from these big gatherings, because they knew what had happened in 1967 and ’68 in Ohio, in Youngstown, in Cleveland, Toledo, and the Columbus area. So, they told them not to be where lots of white people were gathered. They might get targeted. But the leadership was there that day, and one of the guys came to me and said, “Who are you? Do you know your parents’ phone numbers?” Within five minutes of the shootings, he was on a phone in Prentice Hall, calling my parents and letting them know. So they knew about it, almost instantaneously. Unlike Joe Lewis’s parents, who found out about it through the news, same with Jeffrey Miller’s mom.
BEN POST
Something flashed through my brain. I said, I’m one of them, and I’m supposed to be covering this, and I’m not doing my job as a journalist because I’m being overwhelmed emotionally. I gave a broad look around the area, and there were some people at a distance, grouped around objects on the ground, which turned out to be bodies. I didn’t know what to do. Should I run towards the guard? Or should I run towards students?
I decided, I’ve got to report it to the newspaper. So I turned around and went back to the office of the director of the journalism school; his name was Murvin Perry. I knew him pretty well, and I said, “I need to call the newspaper.” He said, “Sure, go ahead.” So I called the newspaper and I said, “There’s been a shooting on campus, and a group of students have been shot and I don’t know how many or how seriously.” And then somebody said, “Well, UPI is reporting that guardsmen were shot.” And I said, “No, I didn’t see any guardsmen shot.” I said, “I don’t know if that happened. But I know students have been shot.” I said, “But guardsmen haven’t been shot, don’t go with that.” And they said, “Well, UPI is saying that they were.” And then the line went dead, because they cut off all the telephones on the campus.
BOB GILES
We had seven or eight journalists on the campus on Monday morning, May 4. A key reporter was Jeff Sallot, who was just graduating from Kent State. We had offered him a job, and he was stringing for us at the time. Jeff got himself positioned in a window on the top floor of Taylor Hall, the journalism school, so he could see what was happening. The students were around, some on their way to class and some protesting, and the guards started throwing tear gas. A few of the kids were throwing rocks and giving them the finger and so on. The guards came up and went past Taylor Hall, went down the hill to the athletic field, and then they turned around and they knelt down in a firing position, which is pretty scary looking. All of a sudden they started shooting. The record says twenty-eight guardsmen shot sixty-seven bullets fired in thirteen seconds. Jeff
Sallot had an open line, and he dictated what he was seeing back to the city desk in Akron.
At the moment we were ready to go to press with our main home-delivered edition and we were able to report that four students had been killed and nine wounded. We had a reporter named Bob Page, at the Robinson Memorial Hospital in Ravenna, which was a nearby town, where all the victims were taken. The UPI, which was a big wire service in Ohio in those days, moved a story that said four dead, two of them were guardsmen. A lot of radio stations and a lot of newspapers ran with that for the afternoon edition, including the Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier. That was their lead story: Four killed and two guardsmen. So that set in the public mind, to the extent that this version of the news was heard, the idea that the students had killed two guardsmen. Jeff Sallot, who watched the shooting from a window in Taylor Hall, insisted firmly, “I’m very sure that these were all students.” So we went with him, and of course it turned out to be right.
JOHN FILO
I changed film, put that roll in my pocket, marked it, scratched it, too, reloaded the film, and started shooting more. I had all these students shouting in my ears: “You pig, what are you doing? Why are you shooting? You’re an animal.” It was almost preventing me from shooting. So you just kept shooting, and you tried to work through it. I remember there were forty, fifty people around each wounded person up on that hill. But I knew that this person was dead. He was Jeffrey Miller. There are other casualties further away in the parking lot. Poor Sandy Scheuer was just going into her dorm room and got hit with a stray bullet. Bill Schroeder, the ROTC guy, was on the ground with his books over his head, but the bullet entered his buttocks, went through his thoracic cavity, and came out his shoulder. All the vital organs were gone. Allison Krause was behind a car, shot through the chest. You just saw cars with windows shattered and bullet holes in doors. I photographed that.
A group of guardsmen finally came over to the body of Jeffrey Miller, and the sergeant leading the group put his boot under him and rolled the body over. They walked away and they never took off their gas masks.
DEAN KAHLER
The students rolled me over, and they propped my head up a little bit so I could breathe a little easier, and eventually the ambulance people came to get us. Now, remember, the ambulances back then are not the same as the ambulances today. Just think of 1965, or ’66, or even 1970, that technology hadn’t reached northeast Ohio yet. All we had were hearses that were painted red and white with gold lettering on it for fire departments, and the technique back then was “load and go like hell.” That was the unofficial title of the technique, “load and go.”
JOE LEWIS
A person came up to me who was an older brother of a high school classmate of mine. He took out my wallet I guess for identification. I couldn’t sit up. I asked him, “How bad is it?” He said, “I think it’s just a flesh wound.” I got great relief from that, even though I still couldn’t sit up. Students gathered around me, and a young woman came to my right, and I squeezed and held her hand. She stayed with me and held my hand, and other students came and tried to help by putting pressure on the wound and giving me first aid. I felt like I was dying. I could feel my life leaving my body. I wasn’t afraid, but just to be safe, seeing that I was raised Catholic, I said a good Act of Contrition, saying I was sorry for my sins, just to cover all the bases. I felt much better after that.
They loaded us on the ambulance. I was in an ambulance with another person who had been shot. Later, I found out that it was John Cleary, who also survived. He was shot through the lungs, and he was in horrible pain. His screams at every bump and turn terrified me. I thought that I was going to die. Eventually, we got to the hospital in Ravenna—Robinson Memorial Hospital. The last thing I remember was, they said to me, “We’re going to cut off your clothes.”
LAUREL KRAUSE
They cut all the phone lines so that no one could call in or out. This is common in military battles. We still haven’t been notified about Allison’s killing by Kent State University or U.S. government authorities. My uncle Jack in Cleveland heard my sister had been killed on the radio, and he called my dad; they’re brothers. I came home on the school bus, and one of my neighbors ran up to me and said, “Allison’s been hurt. The newspaper reporters have been here. Call your mom.” My mom worked. I called her. She got in the car and came home. She called and called and called, finally got through to Robinson Memorial Hospital, and someone told her that Allison Krause was dead on arrival. My mom collapsed and I screamed. Then we drove to Robinson Memorial to identify her body, and men with guns standing outside the hospital muttered, “They should have shot more.”
JOHN FILO
It seemed like hours before the first ambulance got there. People were saying, “The radio report said there was a gun battle here—two guardsmen and two students killed in a shoot-out.” And everybody was like, “Oh my God, that was the initial radio report.” So everyone was like, “Cover-up, there’s going to be a big cover-up.” I was shocked that—why would you shoot down the hill? Why would you retreat from a position, and then reappear, and then just start shooting, without a warning like, “If you don’t disperse, we’re going to shoot”? There was none of that.
A group of students said, “We’re going down to ask the guard why did they shoot?” I said, “Okay, I’ll go with this group.” It was maybe three hundred people. They went down, and they sat in front of the guard, and we’re around this burned-out ROTC building. Some envoy went over and came back and said, “The guard general said if you don’t disperse, they’re going to shoot again.” This is the first time I was really afraid. Because the other one was, who knew you were going to be shot at? No one moved. I thought, This is crazy. Finally, one of the professors, Glenn Frank, got on a bullhorn, and he was in tears asking everyone to just go away. They mean it. I think within an hour, the university was closed. Everyone went back to their dorms. Thank God for those professors.
I got really paranoid, because the radio report hadn’t changed, and there was no one from the national media on that side; there were just student photographers, and student journalists who witnessed everything, and I said, “Well, if it’s going to be a cover-up, they’re going to be coming after people that have cameras.” These were paranoid times. So I said, All right, I’ve got to get out of here, and I’ve got to take my film.
I was so paranoid. I took my film, and I hid it in the car. I mean, if they searched the car, you could have found it, but I didn’t want it on me. I hid my cameras; I didn’t want them on me. I didn’t want them to know I was a photographer. As I was driving off campus, I saw the most unusual thing. I saw guardsmen on the telephone poles, literally lopping off a big old cable, and I’m thinking, That’s bizarre. That made me even more paranoid—a big heavy telephone cable dropping to the ground. I got to my apartment, grabbed a few clothes, and drove. As I drove out of Kent, there was a big crossroads being patrolled by guardsmen, and I went, Oh shit. I hope this isn’t a roadblock. But actually, it was just a traffic control thing, because they were moving more guardsmen in and more trucks out. I got through that, and then for some reason, I felt once I got across the state line, it was like crossing a frontier.
I called my newspaper in Pennsylvania, The Valley Daily News, and I remember the chief said to me, “Did you get anything?” I said, “I think so.” The newspaper was two and a half hours away. Then we had a little argument. They said, oh, they want to hold it up for the next day’s paper, and I said, “No, if it’s what I think I have, they’re saying it’s a shoot-out, and that’s not the way it happened. It needs to go out today on the national wire.”
JOE LEWIS
For several days I struggled to stay alive with various infections in intensive care. My wounds were a small entry wound, the size of a quarter, and a large exit wound in my hip the size of a Coke can. And then, down on my leg, because the bullet went between my leg bones, the in and out holes are both pretty small, like the size of a dime.
>
My parents were very suspicious after I got shot, because they were of the generation that was before Watergate. This was before anyone doubted that the government told the truth. So, at first they were very concerned that I had participated in some illegal behavior. I remember, after forty-eight hours of unconsciousness, coming to in the intensive care unit, the only thing I could say was what I needed to say to my parents, who were at my bedside—that I didn’t do anything wrong. That was the only thing I could get out for another day. But I wanted to assure them that what they presumed wasn’t true. That this was a horrible thing that had happened, and I had done nothing to precipitate it—well, not much to precipitate it.
JOHN FILO
We found the two rolls I had scratched and developed the film.
I was a little shaken. I was nervous. I let the guys that taught me photography do the processing. I trusted them. We did the lesser roll, processing and chemistry was fine, then we did the real roll with Mary Vecchio crying over the body of Jeffrey Miller, and then we did the student waving the flag. We got to transmit that, but this is back in the analog days; you could only move about a hundred and twenty pictures a day, not like today, with digital. You had to phase a motor, and it would scan an image, and read the caption. You had to write a caption. I kept trying to schedule this picture, Mary Vecchio over the body of Jeffrey Miller, and the New York traffic guy for the AP said, “Where are you? How far are you from the scene?” You had like about thirty seconds to state your case.
Witness to the Revolution Page 41
