The Story of the Kent State Shootings

On May 4, 1970, four Kent State University students were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen when they fired into a crowd of students protesting the invasion of Cambodia in the Vietnam War and the presence of the soldiers on campus.
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This Knight Newspapers diagram demonstrates the Guardsmen's movements and where each student
​was shot.  The chart, which was based on FBI records, misplaces Alan Canfora, who was actually behind one of the trees with bullet holes, and Tom Grace, who was a few feet away. The errors occurred because Canfora lied to the FBI about where he was and Grace refused to cooperate with the FBI at all. William Schroeder was also misplaced. He was 390 feet from the Guardsmen, not far from Sandra Scheuer. Three of the four fatalities were more than the distance of a football field away. The closest fatality, Jeffrey Miller, was 265 feet from the Guardsmen.
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​An arial view of the shooting scene as it originally appeared in 1970. The outline shows where Kent State built a gym annex over a significant chunk of the confrontation site. In 1977 192 people were arrested in a futile attempt to force KSU to build the gym elsewhere on campus.

Guards Tear Gas the Students

The Guardsmen move the students off Kent State's Commons by firing tear gas. 

(Photo ©Kent State University News Service May 4 Photographs. May 4 election. Kent State University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives.)

The Four Victims of the Kent State Shooting

Jeffrey Miller
Jeffrey Miller
Allison Krause
Allison Krause
Sandra Scheuer
Sandra Scheuer
William Schroeder
William Schroeder

THE KENT STATE SHOOTINGS: WILLIAM A. GORDON'S BOOK
FOUR DEAD IN OHIO: WAS THERE A CONSPIRACY AT KENT STATE?

Mr. Gordon's book Four Dead in Ohio remains the first and only study to re-examine the various explanations why the four students were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State.
During the Kent State trials it was widely assumed that someday a scholar (or scholars) would diligently study the mountains of evidence deliberately preserved for history, sift fact from fiction, and finally answer the questions that dominated the public debate. The most important question was: "Why were four students killed by Ohio National Guardsmen during a campus protest on May 4, 1970?"
To date, only one person has accomplished this almost herculean feat. That person is William A. Gordon, a 1973 graduate of the university who, as a freelance journalist, covered the aftermath and wrote numerous articles and opinion pieces over a period of 19 years.

Mr. Gordon, who is now a full-time author and publisher, was a quiet yet virtually ubiquitous figure in the aftermath. He reported on events as they actually unfolded, attended the trials, reviewed thousands of pages of official documents, and talked to as many of the key players in the Kent State tragedy as he could.

His research included over 200 new interviews with 170 people, including eyewitnesses to the shootings, Ohio National Guardsmen, high ranking Justice Department and White House officials, attorneys in both the criminal and civil trials, surviving wounded students and the parents of the fatalities, an Ohio governor, and local law enforcement officials.

Mr. Gordon was also the only journalist to review the extensive pretrial depositions taken for the wrongful death and injury trials and the 44-volume, 13,000-page trial transcript. Along with other journalists, he also filed Freedom of Information Act requests which resulted in the release of the FBI's 8,000 page investigative file and other internal Justice Department documents. 

Additionally, Mr. Gordon conducted research in the archives at Yale; Kent State; the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus, Ohio; and Richard's Nixon presidential papers, which were then housed in Arlington, Virginia. 
​William A Gordon is the author of the book, Four Dead in Ohio: Was There a Conspiracy at Kent State? and the leading Kent State shootings expert, due to his exhaustive investigation of the tragedy which happened on May 4, 1970 at his alma mater, Kent State University. He is available for interviews.
A jeep moves out so a Kent State policeman can order the students to disperse. The crowd was peaceful until this point. The Sixth Circuit of Appeals eventually ruled that the Guardsmen could legally ban the rally because the previous nights' protests had turned violent.  (Photo ©Kent State University News Service May 4 Photographs. May 4 election. Kent State University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives.)