Even faculty members like Tyrrell paid a price. Special Collections and Archives. Mary Ann Vecchio is about 15 feet to the right wearing a dark v-neck t-shirt. I don't remember the ambulance ride.”. Ohio National Guard march toward students on the commons. Sgt. President Nixon deplored the campus deaths. I mean, it’s burnt — burnt into my mind and my memory.”, “So we looked around, and you noticed in the parking lot,” said Benedict, “some of the kids weren’t getting up.”. “At that point I looked at Joseph, and I saw he was giving them the finger,” she said. The man in the black suit and tie is Prof. Glenn Frank. Junior Ken Hammond, who had been active in the Students for a Democratic Society a year earlier, spoke to the crowd from the brick wall where the “victory bell” was mounted on the south end of the commons. KSU News Service]. In 2018, on the 48th anniversary of the shooting, the site was dedicated as a National Historic Landmark. Special Collections and Archives. “None of them that I could see were reaching the jeep; it was a little too far in front of them, but they were more or less letting them know that they had no intention of going.”, As Chuck Ayers saw it, “the army itself was the symbol of what everyone was angry about.”. Dr. Sybert said the final autopsy report wouldn’t be completed for about a week. Not all of those hurt or killed were involved in the demonstration, which opposed the U.S. bombing of neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam War. The protests were the result of Nixon’s move to invade Cambodia. Remember Kent State, May 4, 1970: An Iconic Moment for a Generation... A Coming of Conscience for a Country May 03, 2018 / Rita Dragonette. The shooting climaxed student demonstration and disturbances on the campus and in the city that began Friday in the wake of President Nixon’s address to the nation Thursday night on sending U.S. troops into Cambodia. The university, ordered evacuated after the shooting, was virtually deserted this morning and under heavy police and military guard. He said about 400 students were harassing the guardsmen and “they turned and opened fire. [Kent State University Libraries. University employee Bill Barrett was in front of the Guard, beginning to head downhill to the commons. A rally was planned for noon but student Curtis Pittman was not going. In the hours immediately after the shootings, reporters at the chaotic scene struggled to determine who had fired the shots and why. Shouldn’t I shoot?’ I couldn’t shoot, there was someone in front of me…Several of us were lowering our weapons into the firing position, but our own men were in front of us. Some students tried to hit them with rocks but most fell short. So I was kind of getting my camera, I was winding it, getting ready to take another shot and suddenly, they just turned and fired. “She was next to me, and I said, ‘Let’s go. One was stabbed in the hand. A Kent State memorial provides information on the May 4 tragedy. “They ran. I did touch him, I did touch and hold his hand ’cause I didn't want him to feel alone. Ellen Mann was walking with her friend Joseph Lewis 30 yards below the retreating Guard. I’d never seen anything like that. “There was one person whose name I don’t remember who’d been in my class who came back. Many students who had been off campus over the weekend returned to Kent Sunday to find the school had an occupying force of several hundred guardsmen. “They paid about as much attention as protesters will pay, throwing rocks and things,” he recalled. [Mark Urycki]. So we knew we had to put some pressure on that. [Mark Urycki]. Just kept flowing.”. He arrived incognito and never showed himself. How could these deaths have been avoided? Officers at the scene immediately called for a cease-fire.”. The Iconic Kent State Photo. “And I’m sayin’ to myself, ‘Should I shoot? A Kent State memorial provides information on the May 4 tragedy. Gen. Sylvester T. Del Corso, said the troops began firing from semiautomatic rifles after a rooftop sniper had shot at them. About 75 guardsmen marched with bayonets out to drive the students up a hill where Taylor Hall stood and then continued down the other side to a practice football field where they stopped. It just really knocked me down. He never heard an order and wasn’t sure why his fellow soldiers were shooting but he was ready to join them. “the Ohio Highway Patrol-via a helicopter-spotted a sniper on a nearby building.”. [Frank Smith / Kent State University Libraries. [Kent State University Libraries. I can’t speak for anyone else in the Guard, but knowing that there was firing going on, I would have more than likely emptied my weapon.”, “But their leaders, they were halfway down the hill,” noted Benedict. After the shootings a silence fell over the area. In 2012, she was part of a group that applied to make the site an historic landmark.