Roseann Canfora

Roseann Canfora was was one of four women among the Kent 25 defendants. She prefers to be called Chic, a nickname given to her by her brother Alan, also a Kent 25 defendant. She says she and many others did nothing wrong that day because they were legally speaking their mind in disagreement with their country.

"I'm not sure if it was my actions before or after the shootings that concerned the special grand jury enough to charge me with second-degree riot," Canfora says. The charge was later dismissed.

Even 30 years later, Canfora remembers May 4 as if it happened yesterday. She was a 19-year-old student at Kent State when she heard the announcement made by President Nixon on April 30, 1970, that he was sending American forces into Cambodia. It's not hard to understand that it struck the Canforas emotionally since they had just attended a funeral for their friend Bill Caldwell, who was killed in Vietnam.

"With Bill's death fresh in our minds, several of us traveled to Ohio State on Friday to attend an anti-war demonstration on their campus," she says.

They returned to Kent that night and continued their protest in downtown Kent. It turned into a riot once the Hell's Angels showed up on their motorcycles. The spray-painting of anti-war slogans on windows escalated to the smashing of windows and the looting of businesses. The disturbance in downtown Kent prompted the city's mayor to ask Ohio Gov. James A. Rhodes to call in the state National Guard the next day, Saturday, May 2.

Canfora recalls certain catch phrases Rhodes used during a press conference in response to the Friday night vandalism.

"We're not going to treat the symptoms," Rhodes said. "We're going to eradicate the problem." She took it as a strong message, but at 19, she may have underestimated the danger of the governor's inflammatory words.

On May 4, Canfora and her friend Jimmy Riggs, who was later indicted, went to her brother's Summit Street apartment to meet up with mutual friends who were planning to attend the noon rally. They called themselves the Kent Krazies, a name some of the students adopted when they protested an SDS demonstration in Washington, D.C., in 1969.

Chic Canfora, her brother, and some other Kent students had attended a demonstration where SDS leaders advised activists to form small affinity groups to stick together and protect each other during the protest. When they returned to Ohio, they continued to wear their red headbands and refer to themselves as the Kent Krazies.

Chic Canfora stands up to a Kent State Board of Trustees member during the July 1977

Chic Canfora stands up to a Kent State Board of Trustees member during the July 1977 "Tent City" demonstration. When news broke that university officials approved construction of a gym annex on the May 4 site, hundreds of people set up camp and started a "Move the Gym" campaign.
When the Krazies showed up at the Commons, the victory bell at the bottom of Taylor Hill started ringing to alert students to a rally. Canfora says thousands of students began to gather at the Commons.

Later, in a standoff on the other side of Taylor Hall, Chic Canfora watched a troop of guardsmen go down on one knee to aim at her brother Alan, who was waving a black flag and shouting insults.

She walked up to her brother and told him that she didn't trust the guardsmen -- they were aiming directly at him.

"They're going to do something," she said. "Let's get out of here."

"Wait," Alan said, "I want to see where they're going."

She returned to the Prentice parking lot, where Jimmy Riggs was standing. She saw puffs of smoke coming from their weapons before she heard the first crack of rifles. Seconds later, bodies were lying on the ground. Screams and chaos followed.

She first saw Bill Schroeder's body a few feet behind her, then Sandy Scheuer. She ran down a hill and toward a crowd hovering over a man who was lying face down. She was scared to death it was her brother.

When she approached the body, she discovered it was Jeff Miller who had been shot in the head. His blood was streaming down the road toward Memorial Gym.

In shock, she ran into the classrooms screaming about what the Guard had done. She was restrained on top of Blanket Hill for screaming "Murderers!" after finding out that her own brother and several others were shot.

Chic and Alan returned to campus with their parents after he was released from Robinson Memorial Hospital to gather up their belongings because the campus was being evacuated. The top of Blanket Hill was littered with shells. When she reached to pick up a handful, her father warned her to leave them alone.

"It's important evidence of what happened here," he said.

She angrily dropped the shells in plain sight of the triggermen who were still assembled with the remaining guardsmen. It was then that she finally broke down and sobbed, screaming, "Murderers!" one last time.

Chic Canfora works full time as a teacher at Hudson High School. She is a single mother of three children, ages 18, 16 and 11. She plans to have finished her dissertation by May 2000 to earn a doctorate in educational administration. It will be her fourth degree at Kent State -- she received a B.S. in education, an M.A. in journalism and an M.A. in educational administration.

-- Mimi Hoang Kuehn

Jeffrey Hartzler

Wearing a black leather jacket and a black hat, Jeffrey Hartzler expressed his frustration and support of the anti-war protests by parading with a red flag and throwing stones at the National Guard.

Hartzler, who was a junior secondary education major at the Orrville branch, was charged with second-degree rioting. He says the student protests were about more than political ideals.

"It was an emotional thing," Hartzler, now 51, recalls. "I know it wasn't the right thing to do, but here we are at our university getting pushed around."

Although the charges were ultimately dropped, the stigma changed his life forever. After being arrested, Hartzler says he was unable to receive his teaching certificate because Kent State deemed his morals "not up to snuff to be a teacher."

But Hartzler, now self-employed as a painting contractor in Wooster, says he doesn't regret participating in the anti-war rallies. "It wasn't a bad thing to be a part of the Kent 25," he says. "It was kind of scary being arrested at the time. But it was really exciting. The anti-war movement was really a big deal for us."

-- Kelli Young



  
The pavement where they fell
  May 12, 1977 -- "Tent City", a sit-in, is established on Blanket Hill to protest the building of the Gym Annex on part of the May 4 site. Participants include protesters from the May 4, 1970 rally, such as Bill Arthrell and Alan Canfora, and families of the slain students.