Transcription of the recorded statement of Marc Miller conducted by the Commission on KSU Violence.

[Tape 1]

[Unknown Speaker]: This is a continuation of a statement by Marc Miller, statement number 129. Okay, Marc, and what was it you began to tell Dr. Ohles over the phone?

[Marc Miller]: [unintelligible] that the night before May 4th, the night of May 3rd, I was walking around the halls of the dormitory keeping kids from throwing things out the window. They were throwing water–they were going to throw water balloons. I think I caught most of the kids before anybody really threw anything–at least the water balloons that I saw.

[Unknown Speaker]: Was this at the Guardsmen they were going to throw them at?

[Marc Miller]: Yeah, we had–there were I don’t know how many Guardsmen for sure, but they were like in groups of three standing around the outside of the dorm the night the helicopters were flying–

[Unknown Speaker]: Which dorm was this now?

[Marc Miller]: Johnson Hall.

[Unknown Speaker]: Johnson Hall.

[Marc Miller]: And I just went around warning kids not to throw things and antagonize the Guardsmen any more than they were doing, just by yelling things out the windows at them. Every time the helicopters flew over, guys were out in front of the dorm just jumping around and making fools of themselves.

[Unknown Speaker]: What type of guys were these? Were these like radical students or were they just kids horsing around?

[Marc Miller]: It was just mainly kids horsing around. I don’t think that there’s anybody really radical in Johnson that I–I was vice president, so I knew a lot of the guys and I really don’t think that there was anybody out there that would be the kind of guys that would be throwing rocks. Joe Lewis lived in the dorm and he was one of the guys that got shot in the stomach and he was just standing up on the steps of Taylor Hall–on that patio behind Taylor Hall when the shooting started when he got hit.

[Unknown Speaker]: Joe Lewis–do you know what he majors in or anything like that? Would he–you don’t think he’s the type of person that would have been–

[Marc Miller]: No, well with that long hair–but he was just out there watching, man, like he was a rather quiet guy.

[Unknown Speaker]: Did you see him Monday at all out there?

[Marc Miller]: I knew that he was out there with a couple other guys from the dorm that had long hair, but I wouldn’t term them radical to the point of being violent.

[Unknown Speaker]: You don’t think they’d be the type to throw a rock at the Guard?

[Marc Miller]: No. Well, it’s hard to say, but personally I don’t think they would. The guys that were throwing rocks out there, I couldn’t pick anybody out. They looked like any other college kid. Some of them had long hair and some of them had short hair, and I don’t know if I made a statement in there or not about the kind of rocks they were throwing, but these were just rocks they were picking up right off the ground. I didn’t see anybody come armed with a handful of rocks or anything. So, it was just–it looked quite spontaneous to me and they were just throwing the canisters of gas back and other than that, I really don’t know if I could pick anybody out.

[Unknown Speaker]: The ones that were throwing rocks–did you recognize any of them? They were just all–

[Marc Miller]: I recognized them as being students from here. You see kids that you recognize around campus. I mean, I don’t know them personally.

Oh, I know what else I was telling Dr. Ohles. After the shooting, I was up in Pete [Benoit’s?] room who was president at Johnson Hall, and there was a few other fellas up there, too–Dave [Stefans?] was one of them and Baker–the one that ran for president, was–well I can’t say he was really up there, he was out on The Commons area and just around the dormitory area with Dave [Stefans?] with walkie-talkies, and we had a CB radio up in the room and we were just kind of–I guess they were looking for people that didn’t belong on campus. I guess they were looking for people that they thought were agitators.

[Unknown Speaker]: Outside agitators? And what made you feel that? That they told you?

[Marc Miller]: Well, yeah. That was just mainly what they were reporting. Once in a while, they’d say, “We think we see somebody that has been sighted before.” I don’t know if they were directly in contact with the police or not.

[Unknown Speaker]: You heard this through your receiver in your room?

[Marc Miller]: Yes, yeah.

[Unknown Speaker]: And you don’t know who they were sending this to, do you? Or who was receiving the information?

[Marc Miller]: We were. We had a two-way speaker–

[Unknown Speaker]: Yes, but who were they actually trying to speak to? You, up in your room? Or were they trying to speak to someone, say, like Dr. Matson?

[Marc Miller]: No, I guess it was Pete [Benoit?] and Dave [Stefans?].

[Unknown Speaker]: They were in that room upstairs?

[Marc Miller]: Dave was out on The Commons area and Pete was up in the room, yes. And I don’t know if anybody gave them permission to do this or not, but later on in the afternoon there were several professors that came upstairs and were talking to us, but I don’t know the professors either. I recognized them, but they were just up there interested. Also, we were probably one of the first groups to find out the students had been killed because the kids with the walkie-talkies were back there after the shooting took place and they relayed the information to us and then we called–I think they called one of the radio stations or something because they were putting reports on that Guardsmen were killed, or police, but not students.

[Unknown Speaker]: And you don’t know, like, who authorized Dave, or if those guys were just doing it for their own benefit or anything like that?

Do you know–did any of the other students in your dorm see anything that happened?

[Marc Miller]: Yes, I’m pretty sure they–that there were some that did. There was the one boy that was standing with Joe Lewis, who was right next to him when he got shot, but I don’t remember his name. You could find out by talking to Mr. Fitzgerald. He was the Resident Director of Johnson Hall and he’s living there this summer, so you could probably talk to him and find out [unintelligible].

[Unknown Speaker]: Will you be back next year, Marc?

[Marc Miller]: Well, I’ll be here all summer, plus up until March.

[Unknown Speaker]: What do you think it’ll be–what do you think the student attitude will be like next year?

[Marc Miller]: Well, I’ve heard rumors that there’s gonna be trouble again, but I think the whole campus has changed, really. People are–at least the first couple weeks it was hard to talk to people because all that they talked about was the incident of that weekend. I think that, if the administration doesn’t try to communicate with the students and get their feelings, personally–I don’t know if there’d be violence, but I’m sure that there would be demonstrations.

[Unknown Speaker]: What type of feelings do you mean? What type of communication do you think is needed?

[Marc Miller]: I think kids are just tired of hearing promises that are gonna–that are made concerning certain things, like, I don’t know anything specifically, but–

[Unknown Speaker]: You mean, like, the Black demands maybe, or–

[Marc Miller]: Things like that. I imagine that would be a good example.

[Unknown Speaker]: Do you think that concerns the average student? Do you think he’d demonstrate over the Black demands?

[Marc Miller]: Not the average student, but the student who demonstrated before–I think it’ll be the–it might involve more now.

[Unknown Speaker]: Do you think we’re going to have as many observers or innocent bystanders as we had last time?

[Marc Miller]: That’s hard to say, too. Kids might be afraid to go out there again.

[Unknown Speaker]: Do you think the students are going to be looking for revenge, as far as the Guardsmen go?

[Marc Miller]: No, I don’t think so.

[Unknown Speaker]: Do you think that, as time has gone on since May 4th, that more people are beginning to support what the Guardsmen did, or not support it, or what?

[Marc Miller]: Well, I think one of the biggest problems is the news media is twisting around the information, because I know in Toledo I talked for quite a long time to somebody at one of the television stations–I’m not sure if he was a news director, but he was part of the staff, and they had put some kind of crazy report on that some student rushed out of the dorm called [Ogdon?] Hall, which doesn’t even exist on this campus, and a girl fired the first shot. So, right after this report came over the air–

[End of Tape 1]

[Beginning of Tape 2]

[Unknown Speaker]: This is tape number two with Marc Miller. Okay, Marc, now let’s relate from the time right before the shooting through the shooting what you observed.

[Marc Miller]: Well, I was walking toward the practice football field to take some pictures of the Guardsmen marching out there, and on the way over there I stopped and talked to one of the Guardsmen, and there were a few kids out there calling the Guardsmen names and throwing rocks, and I just told–I asked the Guardsmen if there was anything that could be done–what kind of powers were they given? He told me that they were just supposedly supposed to keep the students in line and they weren’t really given much power at all. And he started walking away, so I went up and started taking their pictures, and I imagine I took three or four pictures and I ran out of film and I started to walk back to Johnson, and all of a sudden I started hearing shots. I wasn’t sure what they were at first. It sounded like a whole string of firecrackers going off. And after that, I started to walk down–after the shooting and the people started running, I started to go back down the hill, and the Guardsmen that were standing outside of Memorial Gymnasium, started screaming at the students to clear the area and to get away and it appeared to me that the Guardsmen were on the opposite side of the hill and couldn’t see anything. They were in basically the same condition I was–very panicky.

[Unknown Speaker]: Were they afraid for life, you think, when they started shooting?

[Marc Miller]: I don’t know if they knew any more than I did. I don’t know really what gunfire sounds like. I do now, but at the time I didn’t and like I said, I thought it was firecrackers. Well I imagine they knew exactly that it was gunfire.

[Unknown Speaker]: Mhm.

[Marc Miller]: And I don’t know–they didn’t know any more than I did of what happened.

[Unknown Speaker]: So, what did they scream at the students?

[Marc Miller]: Just to get away and to clear the area. I don’t know if it was for fear that somebody had gotten shot, or what. The rumors that I had heard before the shooting took place that there were blanks in the guns. I didn’t believe or disbelieve this because I wasn’t sure, but those were the rumors that I had heard. And even after I got back to the dormitory, I heard rumors that it was only blanks, and then one of the kids came running in.

[Unknown Speaker]: So you didn’t know that the students were shot, that anyone had been shot?

[Marc Miller]: I didn’t know anybody was killed, no. But I heard the shots going off, and I knew it was guns after going on–it only lasted maybe three or four seconds, but after I got into the dorm, I heard that kids had been shot because this one boy that was standing out there with Joe Lewis said that he was shot in the stomach and that they weren’t blanks. That’s one of the main things they started screaming when they came in–that “There’s kids dead out there!” and that “They weren’t blanks, they weren’t blanks!”

[Unknown Speaker]: And who was this that was screaming this?

[Marc Miller]: That one boy that was with Joe Lewis. I wish I could remember his name–it might have been Tim.

After that, it was just a state of confusion. The ambulances drove up the hill in front of–or next to Taylor and started picking up kids that were hit, but I–after the shooting took place, I stayed in the dorm like I said. I watched out the window while they picked up a few of the kids, and then I went into Pete’s room and listened to the radio.

[Unknown Speaker]: Did anything very interesting come on over the radio that you were listening to?

[Marc Miller]: Well, just that the four students had been killed–that there were four people out there that didn’t look like they were alive, and that there were several others that had been shot. But, just throughout the afternoon, we just kept hearing reports that people said that there were snipers and that the–other than that, there was just general conversation about watching to keep people away from the area. I don’t really think that there was anything earth-shattering that came over. These guys didn’t, I don’t think, discovered anything that the police didn’t know about.

But we had binoculars, too, and we saw policemen stationed at the top of the heating plant, and they kicked a few kids off of there that had gotten up there somehow. And then we saw several policemen on top of the administration building, too. There were campus policemen on the heating plant, and I believe there were campus policemen on top of the library–or on top of the Administration Building, too. There were all kinds of newsmen walking around campus, interviewing kids after the shooting.

[Unknown Speaker]: Did you hear one shot before the other shots went off, do you remember?

[Marc Miller]: Yeah, like I said before, if you’ve seen firecrackers in the strings, you light the first fuse and they’ve got a roll–10 or 20–and that’s exactly what it sounded like to me. I didn’t hear one distinct shot and then the others followed. It just all seemed to come at once. Although it took three or four seconds, like I said before, but one shot had to be fired first, so I imagine that there was a first shot–that it wasn’t distinctly a first shot, where I think there was any lapse of time in between. There was a first shot, but the others came so quickly that–

[Unknown Speaker]: Did you hear any shots after the other ones were over, like, say, a couple minutes later?

[Marc Miller]: No, none at all. I saw that movie that they had on campus yesterday.

[Unknown Speaker]: What did you think of the movie?

[Marc Miller]: I thought it was very objective. It was a good job of reporting. It got me very angry and stirred-up again, the way I felt right after the shooting took place. But I thought it was very objective. The only thing that I didn’t agree with–or what I can’t agree or disagree with–I didn’t hear any Guardsmen shoot after the shooting took place. There were some down there that reported there were kids standing around the body and some Guardsmen shot again to keep the kids away or something. I didn’t hear any shots afterwards and Johnson Hall is right next to the area where this all took place, so I didn’t hear any other shots.

[Unknown Speaker]: Do you feel that movie will tend to incite the students again if they were to see it when they came back?

[Marc Miller]: I don’t think it will incite them to the point of violence. I think it’ll just make them a little bit more dedicated to make some of these people around here a little more open-minded. I mean, when you’ve got people in Kent–adults, living in Kent, saying, “It’s too bad more kids didn’t get killed,” something’s gotta be done and it definitely isn’t violence.

[Unknown Speaker]: What do you think the kids will do?

[Marc Miller]: Well, I don’t know what the kids will do. I know what I think the Administration should do–I think they should have open meetings, inviting the public from Kent onto campus, or have the kids from campus invited to some place off-campus where adults and kids can get together, along with definitely the president of the University and the mayor of the city. I think there has to be some kind of an open forum where all the people in this area can get together and discuss at some kind of a panel discussion, question and answer period, or anything just where the adults and kids can get together, because there’s too many adults in this town, I feel–and probably kids, too–that weren’t here when it happened and heard all these rumors of kids throwing golf balls with spikes in it and concrete–I couldn’t–

[Unknown Speaker]: What if that were true, and you just didn’t know that? What if it were proven that those things were true? Would that change your opinion? What would you say–[change the tape?].

[End of Tape 2] ×