An Iconic Image That Forever Changed The World

Fifty-five years ago, John P. Filo, a Kent State University journalism student and photographer, took a picture that jettisoned him into a lifetime of perpetual fame as an eyewitness with his camera to one of the most tragic moments in 20th century American history.

His photograph of a screaming 14-year-old girl, Mary Ann Vecchio, kneeling over the bleeding and dead body of Kent State University student Jeffrey Miller on May 4, 1970, is an image so powerfully disturbing that it has often been called the “Kent State Pieta.”

The tragedy that unfolded that spring afternoon in a small Ohio town will remain forever engraved in the American psyche as being yet another casualty of the Vietnam War that consumed nearly 60,000 Americans.

The secret bombing of Cambodia, authorized by President Richard M. Nixon, began in 1969, and by late April 1970, he ordered U.S. ground troops to invade the country.

Nixon went on the air on April 28 to announce his decision, several days after the operation had actually commenced.

Tensions over the president’s action ricocheted from coast to coast with demonstrations erupting on college campuses across the nation, and at Kent State, the ROTC building had been burned and the mayor of the town called in the National Guard.

On the afternoon of May 4, Filo was busy working in the college newspaper photo lab helping process film from his fellow photographers who had assignments from out-of-town papers.

When it was time for lunch, he borrowed a camera and headed for the confluence where soldiers and students stood in defiance of one another.

“One student waved a black flag and I thought, ‘I’ve got my picture,'” Filo, 76, said in a telephone interview the other day from his home near Princeton, N.J.

Then the guardsmen formed a rifle line with their weapons pointed toward the demonstrators.

“A guardsman pointed his rifle at me when I put the camera to my eye, and then it went off and a bullet lodged in a tree,” he said.

He fell to the ground, waited for the 13 seconds of gunfire to end, and then stood up to make certain he was alright and hadn’t been hit.

Once he realized it was live ammunition and not blanks, he started to flee the scene and then suddenly stopped.

“I don’t know what gave me the combination of innocence or stupidity,” he told CNN in a 2000 interview. “‘Where are you going?’ I said to myself. ‘”This is why you’re here!'”

And then he saw Miller, a 20-year-old Kent State student, face down on the ground. He had been shot in the mouth.

“How did the guardsman miss me?” he asked the other day. “The width of a sidewalk-width away from me, on my left, there was Jeffrey Miller, dead. It just wasn’t natural.”

Vecchio, a teenage runaway from an abusive Florida home, who had been doing odd jobs, panhandling and crashing in Hippie pads, as she made her way to California, just happened to be on campus at the time of the shooting.

With absolute terror creasing her face she screamed for help for Miller as her arms shot up over her head.

“I could see the emotion welling up inside of her,” Filo told CNN. “She began to sob. And it culminated in her saying an exclamation, I can’t remember what she said exactly … something like, ‘Oh, my God.'”

Filo kept photographing until he no longer had film.

“The general then ordered the crowd to dispense and the university was closed and we were told to go home. That’s when I became scared,” Filo said.

Among the other dead were Allison Beth Krause from Silver Spring, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheurer. Nine were wounded.

As he made his way back, students called Filo a “pig.”

“Student photographers weren’t too popular because students thought they were taking pictures for the government.”

But he knew what he had in his camera was a testament to what had happened there and the world needed to know about it.  

In the ensuing chaos of that tumultuous afternoon, Filo had other ideas and was fearful of his film being confiscated, so he hid the film in the hubcap of his Volkswagen Beetle and raced two hours to the Valley Daily News in Tarentum, P.A., his hometown paper near Pittsburgh, where he had been an apprentice photographer.

The next day, Filo’s picture of Vecchio was on the front page of most of the world’s newspapers. 

For Vecchio, getting away from Kent State as fast as  possible was the only thing on her mind.

National Guard troops were loading students onto buses, and when they arrived in Columbus, Vecchio got off and began wandering the streets. 

She then made her way to Indianapolis and learned the FBI was searching for her, so she told no one she was the girl in the picture.

While crashing, someone recognized her and summoned a reporter from the Indianapolis Star who betrayed her and turned her into the FBI.

She was returned to her home in Florida.   

In 1971, Filo was presented the Pulitzer Prize, the youngest recipient ever to receive one.

For years and years, both Filo and Vecchio were plauged with late night phone calls denouncing them, hate mail and comments from passersbys.

Both suffered from survivor’s syndrome.

“Why Miller and not me?” Filo said.

For his part, Nixon said the students, whom he described in private conversations as “bums,” had been the cause of their deaths.

Twenty-five years passed before Filo and Vecchio met at a Kent State seminar at Emerson College in Boston, and when they greeted each other, they hugged and cried.

Post-Kent State, Filo held a number of photo positions on newspapers and magazines including being photo editor for The Evening Sun in the 1980s where he was known as an affable, talented pipe-smoking colleague.

He later spent 25 years at CBS in New York from which he retired in 2020.

Vecchio married, moved to Las Vegas, where she worked as a cashier and was 39 when she earned her GED.

She divorced, moved back to Florida, and enrolled at Miami Dade Community College where she became a licensed respiratory therapist.

She worked at the Miami VA hospital, where she kept her identity a secret as the girl in the picture.

“I liked working with vets and when they were dying, helping them say Hail Mary,” she said in an interview from her home near Key Largo, Fla.

Now retired, she lives on a small farm raising avocados and animals.

But, it’s clear, what happened 55 years ago is still very much with them.

“Its legacy is everyday and some days are worse than others,” Filo said.

 “I think about it all the time. It was a moment that changed everything and the whole thing for me at Kent State was life altering, but I never get tired of talking about it when asked,” Vecchio said.

“I’ve really thought about it a lot since the 2024 election. It’s Trump and his protestors and I think a lot of people are afraid.

“After what happened Jan 6, 2021 in the attack on the Capitol, I can see them shooting demonstrators.

“This picture needs to be in every newspaper and on TV today. It needs to be plastered everywhere. People all over the world need to see it. They need to see what can happen.”

She added: “I am a nonviolent person and I’ve always tried to be a good American.”

“In so many ways, it’s here we go again, with the return of crazy ideologies,” Filo said. “Back then, pretty much that generation of Americans who had gone through the Depression and World War II believed what the White House said, but for our generation, it was different, and that was the point made at Kent State.”

Historians have concluded the Kent State shooting contributed to the shift in the national discussion of the futility of the Vietnam War even though it raged on for another five years.  

The eight National Guardsmen at Kent State were tried and acquitted.

For the last 55 years, Miller has rested at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, N.Y.