+1

That was a crazy day for those of us living close by. My dad managed a Kroger store on North Chestnut Street in Ravenna, the county seat, and the location of Robinson Memorial Hospital where the injured were taken. He was too young for WW II and medically excluded from Korea, but based on what he had heard from his older brother who was in one of the first waves of troops on Omaha Beach, this was as close to war as he could imagine. They boarded up all of the windows in his store, placed machine guns on the roofs of buildings and basically shut the town down. He said he'd never forget the endless scream of sirens traveling east from Kent to Ravenna. We were in afternoon classes at Goodyear Junior High when the word of what happened began filtering in. Just two years earlier, we had "riots" at East High and Goodyear in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination. Some will say that the 60's ended on May 4th, 1970.

An tragic episode that too many people forget as well.

Not hard to figure out why this one has been largely ignored in the public spectrum.

On may 3rd the Student protesters burned the ROTC armory and all that was in it to the ground, and when the fire trucks responded they attacked the fire trucks and hoses with knives. So don't tell me that Kent did not also contain violence, and that the events of the 3rd and Gov. Rhodes statements the next day did not fuel those events.

Two paragraphs tell you all you need to know about why this one was never met with the public outcry of Kent State. 460 rounds fired and they would not send for an ambulance until they picked up all their shells, then denied being there? Yep, nothing to see hear folks move along!

"When the order to ceasefire was given, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, 21, a junior pre-law major and father of an 18 month-old son, lay dead. Across the street, behind the line of police and highway patrolmen, James Earl Green, 17, was sprawled dead. Green, a senior at Jim Hill High School in Jackson, was walking home from work at a local grocery store when he stopped to watch the action. Twelve other Jackson State students were struck by gunfire. The five-story dormitory was riddled by gunfire. FBI investigators estimated that more than 460 rounds struck the building, shattering every window facing the street on each floor. Investigators counted at least 160 bullet holes in the outer walls of the stairwell alone bullet holes that can still be seen today.

The injured students, many of whom lay bleeding on the ground outside the dormitory, were transported to University Hospital within 20 minutes of the shooting. But the ambulances were not called until after the officers picked up their shell casings, a U. S. Senate probe conducted by Senators Walter Mondale and Birch Bayh later revealed. The police and state troopers left the campus shortly after the shooting and were replaced by National Guardsmen. After the incident, Jackson authorities denied that city police took part."

I hesitate to weigh in on this, as I don't have much info. But it is interesting to me in one of the JSU stories is a claim of 400+ bullet holes in the dormitory wall that included--bullet holes as well as shotgun pellet holes.

Not discounting what happened. Not taking a side. Just found that interesting.