Edlyn and I visited Kent State during our honeymoon as they were hosting the 30th anniversay of the massacre. It was sobering to stand on Blanket Hill from where the guardsmen fired, and look out over the parking lot and field, surrounded on all sides by dormitories, a gymnasium, and a fence. They truly were shooting fish in a barrel.
In my mind, I tried to imagine hearing 67 high-powered rifle shots in 13 seconds along with shrieks, screams, and stampeding shoes scraping across the pavement. Afterward, I tried to imagine a prolonged and eerie silence, followed by wailing, crying, and gurgling from the blood-filled lungs of dying students. I could see the four spots where they fell, marked by lighted pilasters and bronze plaques, and tried to imagine the faces of the four.
Two-hundred and seventy-five feet away from me, Jeffrey Miller was shot in the head. He had transferred to Kent State four months earlier. The morning of May 4, he had called his mother, Elaine Miller, and asked her if he could attend a rally scheduled for noon. She heard the news of the shooting on the radio in her car that afternoon, and called Jeff as soon as she got home. Her call was answered by a young man named Bruce. “Let me speak to Jeff,” she said. He asked who she was. “His mother,” she answered. He paused for what seemed like an eternity to her, and said simply, “He’s dead”.
My eyes wandered to the space three hundred feet away from me where nineteen-year-old honor student Allison Krause was shot through the arm and chest. I thought about her boyfriend, Barry Levine, holding her and gazing with disbelief into her beautiful face as she lay in a pool of blood, trying to speak, murmering that she’d been hit. The prior night, she had pounded hysterically on the door of the Tri-Towers dormitory as guardsmen closed in on her with bayonettes. A stranger had let her in just in time.
I could see a glint of sunlight from the bronze plaque that marked where William Schroeder fell when he was shot in the back at a distance of nearly four-hundred feet. The night before, the strikingly handsome young ROTC student had called his parents to tell them that he was okay, and that he was upset about the burning of the building where he had excelled as an officer candidate, advised by his mentor, Vietnam War veteren Don Peters. Bill died from hemorrhaging in his left lung five minutes after arriving at Robinson Memorial Hospital.
I saw someone placing a yellow rose at the site, roughly four-hundred feet from where I stood, where Sandra Scheuer, who had been studying speech therapy, was shot in the throat. Her mother, Sarah, had been painting outdoors that afternoon when she heard the faint sound of a phone ringing from inside. Her husband, Martin, said that there had been some trouble at the campus. After frantically phoning Sandy’s apartment, the university, and finally the hospital in Ravenna, Sarah’s call was given over to the hospital’s director. He told her that she’d better come on over.
Before leaving for Monticello, Edlyn and I walked all around the campus, visiting the memorials and listening to the stories of people who had been there. I don’t know whether it was my own mood that I projected, but it all seemed so surreal. We watched young students lay flowers at plaques and markers that they walked by every day, but today paused to read and remember as they thought of their fallen predecessors.
One young woman, clutching her books as she knelt at a beautiful memorial of polished granite, looked up at me as I stood with my new bride. She seemed to read my face as she lay down her red rose.
“Were you here?” she asked.
“I guess in spirit I was,” I replied.
She stood and pressed her hand against my arm. “Don’t worry,” she said quietly, “we won’t forget.” I choked back tears as I watched her walk away to her class. I winced as I heard in my mind the rifles firing again.
Who was wrong? I don’t know, but it wasn’t those four.