"... The National Guard regrouped toward Taylor Hall and left my vision. I walked down the sidewalk and, all of a sudden, the guard reappeared. They're shooting at me! I thought it was a new scare tactic. I thought, This is crazy. These blanks are going to put out someone's eyes. I wanted to get a picture of them firing, but a guardsman was pointing his rifle at me. I heard the bullet go by my head, whizzing like a bee. It hit a metal sculpture, knocking off rust, then hit a tree, with a chunk of bark coming off. God, someone's using live ammunition, I thought.
"I saw a body on the asphalt. There was so much blood, I couldn't believe it. My initial reaction was: Am I shot and don't know it? I walked to the dead person. I shot my picture. Then I saw this young girl run up — Mary Ann Vecchio. I knew I was running out of film. I already had the best picture I ever shot. I needed time to change film, but I didn't have time. Mary Ann knelt next to a body.
"I didn't shoot right away because it might have been my last available frame. Mary Ann screamed. I shot the picture, then two more..." -- photographer John Filo, then a 21-year-old journalism student at Ohio's Kent State University, with his eyewitness account of the massacre of four unarmed students by members of the Ohio National Guard on this day 55 years ago. His Pulitzer Prize- winning photo of student Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of one of the dead students, Jeffrey Miller, shocked and outraged that part of the nation that hadn't become numb to the casual violence of the Vietnam War and its spillover into American culture in general. That day was a gut punch to us, a "loss of innocence" moment we'll never forget. Although the charges against the eight Guardsmen who were indicted for the shootings were eventually dropped, the incident is seen as a watershed in the public's support for the war and the culture of violence it spawned.
*Lyric from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's "Ohio."
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