Truth remains elusive for survivors, families of Kent State victims
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10124/1055309-84.stm
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
By Dennis B. Roddy
KENT, Ohio -- Forty years after her daughter became a milepost in
America's journey through anger and chaos, Doris Krause sat in a
second-floor room in this college town and waited for truth to climb
the stairs.
"I wonder if anyone will ever own up to anything," she said.
It was 40 years ago today that Allison Krause, 19, a freshman at Kent
State, was one of four students killed in a 13-second volley of
gunfire by National Guard troops sent to quell antiwar protests on campus.
They killed Jeffrey Miller, who had been throwing rocks and insults.
They killed Allison Krause, who, a day earlier, slid a blossom into a
guardsman's rifle barrel and told him, "flowers are better than
bullets." They killed Sandra Lee Scheuer, a speech therapy student
crossing campus after classes were canceled. They killed William Knox
Schroeder, a former Eagle Scout and ROTC member.
In a sense, they killed William Perkins' youth, and he was among the
guardsmen, holding a rifle on the hillside, his innocence lost in a
crackle of gunfire and a haze of smoke.
"Those were just kids our age, and we were forced to be there," he
said from his home near Akron.
The shooting sparked student strikes around the nation, closed
colleges, flooded Washington with protesters. Kent's students
finished the academic year by mail. Some, like Lois Silverman
Bernstein, never returned. She transferred to Pitt.
"We all felt so violated -- just thinking about the lives that were
lost, what those people could have done, what they could have been,"
she said. Ms. Bernstein's brother was married to Ms. Scheuer's
sister. Sandy was a regular guest at the Silverman home in Wilkins.
Like more than 1,000 other Kent State students, Ms. Bernstein was on
the commons May 4, 1970, when the shooting broke out. After the
deadly volley, she left for home, but first called Sandra Scheuer to
see if she needed a ride as far as her home near Youngstown.
"No answer," she said.
At the bus station her father picked her up, put an arm around her,
and asked her not to scream. That's how she found out a friend was dead.
The Krause family lived in Churchill. Allison was one of two
daughters. This weekend, the surviving Krause sister, Laurel,
presided over a four-day Kent State Truth Tribunal. The idea was to
invite anyone who might know anything -- students, witnesses, family
members, even ex-guardsmen, to visit borrowed offices above a
delicatessen on Water Street and tell their stories into a camera.
Whether anyone would own up, or even if there remained any owning up
to be done, the Krause family could not tell. Two trials -- one
criminal in which eight guardsmen were cleared of wrongdoing, another
civil, which ended with a settlement for the grieving and wounded --
have done little to answer the questions for which Doris and Laurel
Krause seek answers.
Official investigations blamed the Kent State shootings on panic,
confusion and bad judgment. Alan Canfora, a protester who was shot in
the wrist, says someone ordered the guardsmen to fire. Mr. Perkins
says he never heard an order to shoot, that it was a case of
confusion and miscalculation.
Doris Krause can't be sure. She'd like some answers.
"I don't think very much of that school," she said. "To this day
they've never let me know what happened to Allison. They've never
even told me she died."
She learned of her daughter's death from phone calls from reporters.
When she arrived at the hospital near here, nobody from the school
met her. The closest thing they got to an acknowledgment from the
school administration, she said, was an envelope that arrived by mail
after the funeral. It was a check, partial reimbursement for the
spring semester's tuition, made out to Allison Krause, as if a dead
19-year-old could cash it.
As the tribunal opened for business, not everybody in Kent was
pleased with the prospect. Mr. Canfora, one of two members of
Students for a Democratic Society on campus, is a reference librarian
for the Kent State May 4 Center. The Kent library has collected its
own oral history with more than 100 witnesses on tape, and he is wary
of the latest project to collect evidence.
"She's coming in here and creating a lot of confusion," Mr. Canfora said.
Laurel Krause makes no apologies. She was 15 when she lost her sister
and watched her father, Arthur, transformed from a comfortably
suburban World War II veteran and Westinghouse executive into a
crusader who went to the grave still in search of an accounting.
"Our goal is to correct history," she said. "It is our single goal.
The history of Kent State is not correct. The history of Kent State
in textbooks in America does not give an accurate depiction of what happened."
Possibly, the lack of clarity, the lack of agreement on who really
owns the history of Kent State, is at root of the disagreement over
the tribunal. Ms. Krause said 50 participants had pre-registered to
come in and give statements on videotape.
The taping is being done by Emily Kunstler, daughter of the renowned
radical lawyer William Kunstler. Greetings are handled by Jennifer
Schwartz Wright, a cousin of the Krauses who was 10 months old at the
time of the shootings. Her 4-year-old daughter, Allison, is named for
the cousin she never knew.
One of those unlikely to climb the stairs with his story is Mr.
Perkins. He was 24 at the time of the shootings. He was also one of
eight guardsmen later charged by a federal grand jury, and ultimately
cleared by the courts. To this day, he lives 15 miles from the
campus. He has returned three times, he said, looked around,
contemplated the day, and gone home.
"Before this situation happened, the kids were so nice to us and we
never had any problems," he said. The guard was called into town the
preceding Friday, after Ohio Gov. James Rhodes promised to
"eradicate" the violence that had spilled into the town where windows
were smashed.
Mr. Perkins, a member of G Company, had just returned from riot duty
in a Cleveland neighborhood. The students he met in town, he said, charmed him.
"They were the nicest people. They would sit and talk to us about the
war in Vietnam. Of course, we had nothing to do with the war in
Vietnam. The girls would bring us flowers. They were just young
students. We were their age and we got along great," he said.
The abrupt change came mid-morning May 4. Guardsmen made a long loop
across a football practice field, pushing back students with tear
gas. Mr. Canfora said the students had become enraged after several
young people were cut with bayonets. The guardsmen knelt and pointed
at the students, did not fire, then marched up a what is called
Blanket Hill as students gathered in a parking lot below.
That was when guardsmen spun around, seemingly in unison.
"The reason we all turned around was we heard two gunshots. I
honestly can tell you I don't think it came from our ranks," he said.
Twenty-eight guardsmen opened fire on the students below. Mr. Perkins
said he fired five times into the air, convinced that was what the
others were doing. It was only after the shooting stopped that he
realized some of his comrades had pointed at the students. In all,
investigators later concluded 67 shots were fired.
"It was not panic," Mr. Perkins said. "I don't know. We got into a
situation. They tried to remove us from being there and that's what
happened. Push came to shove and you can fill in the blanks."
When the firing subsided, Mr. Perkins said he saw Jeffrey Miller
lying face down in the parking lot driveway. He had been hit in the face.
"You know what?" Mr. Perkins asked. "Those are kids, just like me."
As the weekend wore on, a few more people climbed the stairs at 110
Water St., but if Mr. Perkins was one of them, he did not announce
himself. He looked over the campus a week or so earlier, he said.
Would he come on May 4?
"If I do," he said, "I'd surely not tell them who I am."
--
Dennis B. Roddy: [email protected] or 412-263-1965.
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