Four Dead in Ohio -- new evidence, new investigation?

5 thoughts on “Four Dead in Ohio — new evidence, new investigation?”

1. I grew up in eastern Ohio and was raised by my grandparents there. My uncle was a student at Kent State at the time.

   I was only 4 but I remember it like it was yesterday. My grandmother got a call from one of her sisters to turn on the news. She watched for like 10 minutes and next thing I new we were in the car flying towards Kent. My grandmother was not known for dare-devil driving, but I don’t think I had ever been in a car doing that fast before this.

   When we got there, she saw all of the soldiers and told me to lay down in the back seat. I didn’t listen. She got out and demanded to get through she was there to get her son. They weren’t going to let her through. She pointed out her husband was Gov. Rhodes’ cousin (kinda distant but she left that part out) and we got through.

   We found my uncle easy enough, he had been afraid to leave his dorm room after the National Guard showed up. My grandmother did everything she could thing of to keep me from looking toward the quad where the shootings had happened, but that was hard for her to do while she was driving.

   Years later, when I moved to Alabama while I was still in high school, the college campus that was right next to the high school was being used to film a movie about Kent State. Watching the filming was like living through it again, only this time I was old enough to understand what was happening.

   I ended up going to that college after high school. It was Jacksonville State Univ.

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   1. Creepy, but very interesting. Glad you were not one of the victims.

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   2. In Akron, the city next door to Kent. I was a kid but my oldest sister was a war protester as a student at Ohio Wesleyan, two hours south.

      My mom was driving the car and we heard the news come over the radio. She pulled the car over and started sobbing and sobbing, repeating “They’re killing our children…they’re killing our children.”

      Up until that day, both my parents supported the Vietnam war but that was the end. It was peace all the way after that.

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2. I was in the Navy. Until about Jan of that year I had thought that our Viet nam policies were justified (I was raised in a military family that did not question our government). I attended some peace dems in DC fall of ’69 and began learning more. Kent State was it for me. I became a virulent peacenik.
   
   I vowed that I would always remember one name and that name was Allison Krause. I knew it unlikely to remember all though I wish I had.

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3. Kent State took place 41 years ago.  To my knowledge, no one in the Ohio National Guard was prosecuted, and certainly, no more than one or two Ohio National Guard soldiers involved had any illegal intent.

   Suppose Terry Norman did what he is alleged to have done?  Would there be any crime for which he could be prosecuted today for which the statute of limitations has not run?  His acts, as alleged, would have been reckless, but would probably not have constituted intentional murder, and could any case against him (now in his 60s and probably not reliable in his own recollection of the events) and full of contradictory accounts be established beyond a reasonable doubt?

   Would any of that, even if known for certain in one more investigation change the meaning of Kent State much in our national history?

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