New analysis of 40-year-old recording of Kent State shootings reveals that Ohio Guard was given an order to prepare to fire

Last Updated on Monday, 10 May 2010 22:38 Written by John Mangels, The Plain Dealer Saturday, 08 May 2010 20:12

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New analysis of 40-year-old recording of Kent State shootings reveals that Ohio Guard was given an order to prepare to fire

by:  John Mangels, The Plain Dealer

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/05/new_analysis_of_40-year-old_re.html

Sarah Rice, Special to The Plain DealerForensic audio experts Stuart Allen, seated, and Tom Owen, discuss the contents of a tape that captured the events leading to the May 4, 1970 Ohio National Guard shootings at Kent State University. The Ohio National Guardsmen who fired on students and antiwar protesters at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 were given an order to prepare to shoot, according to a new analysis of a 40-year-old audio tape of the event.

"Guard!" says a male voice on the recording, which two forensic audio experts enhanced and evaluated at the request of The Plain Dealer. Several seconds pass. Then, "All right, prepare to fire!"

"Get down!" someone shouts urgently, presumably in the crowd. Finally, "Guard! . . . " followed two seconds later by a long, booming volley of gunshots. The entire spoken sequence lasts 17 seconds.

View full sizeJohn P. Filo, Valley Daily NewsMary Ann Vecchio cries for help as she kneels by the body of Kent State student Jeffrey Miller, who was shot by National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970. The gunfire volley from the Guard killed four and wounded nine. The previously undetected command could begin to explain the central mystery of the Kent State tragedy - why 28 Guardsmen pivoted in unison atop Blanket Hill, raised their rifles and pistols and fired 67 times, killing four students and wounding nine others in an act that galvanized sentiment against the Vietnam War.

The order indicates that the gunshots were not spontaneous, or in response to sniper fire, as some have suggested over the years.

"I think this is a major development," said Alan Canfora, one of the wounded, who located a copy of the tape in a library archive in 2007 and has urged that it be professionally reviewed. "There's been a grave injustice for 40 years because we lacked sufficient evidence to prove what we've known all along - that the Ohio National Guard was commanded to kill at Kent State on May 4, 1970."

"How do you spell bombshell?" said Barry Levine, whose girlfriend Allison Krause was mortally wounded as he tried to pull her behind cover. "That is obviously very significant. The photographic evidence and eyewitness accounts of what took place seemed to suggest everything happened in those last seconds in a coordinated way. This would be the icing on the cake, so to speak."

The review was done by Stuart Allen and Tom Owen, two nationally respected forensic audio experts with decades of experience working with government and law enforcement agencies and private clients to decipher recorded information.

Allen is president and chief engineer of the Legal Services Group in Plainfield, N.J. Owen is president and CEO of Owl Investigations in Colonia, N.J. They donated their services because of the potential historical significance of the project.

Although they occasionally testify on opposing sides in court cases hinging on audio evidence, Owen and Allen concur on the command's wording. Both men said they are confident their interpretation is correct, and would testify to its accuracy under oath, if asked.

The original 30-minute reel-to-reel tape was made by Terry Strubbe, a Kent State communications student in 1970 who turned on his recorder and put its microphone in his dorm window overlooking the campus Commons, hoping to document the protest unfolding below.

It is the only known recording to capture the events leading up to the shootings - including a tinny bullhorn announcement that students must leave "for your own safety," the pop of tear gas canisters and the wracking coughs of people in their path, the raucous protest chants, the drone of helicopters overhead, and the near-constant chiming of the campus victory bell to rally the demonstrators.

Strubbe has kept the original tape in a bank vault, and recently has been working with a colleague to have it analyzed, and to produce a documentary about what the examination reveals.

The Justice Department paid a Massachusetts acoustics firm, Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., to scrutinize the recording in 1974 in support of the government's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prosecute eight Guardsmen for the shootings. That review, led by the company's chief scientist, James Barger, focused on the gunshot pattern and made no mention of a command readying the soldiers to fire.

Barger still works for the company, now known as BBN Technologies. When told Friday of the new findings, he said via a spokeswoman that in his 1974 review he "did not hear anything like that."

Someone made a copy of the Strubbe tape in the mid-1970s for use in the civil lawsuits that the shooting victims and their families filed against the Guardsmen and Ohio Gov. James Rhodes, who had sent the reserves to restore order at Kent State.

One of the plaintiffs' lawyers donated the cassette copy of the Strubbe tape to Yale University's Kent State archives. Canfora, one of the wounded students, found it while doing research for a book. The Plain Dealer commissioned an analysis of a digitized version of the Yale tape.

View full sizeSarah Rice, Special to The Plain DealerStuart Allen Using sophisticated software initially developed for the KGB, the Soviet Union's national security agency, Allen weeded out extraneous noises - wind blowing across the microphone, and a low rumble from the tape recorder's motor and drive belt -- that obscured voices on the recording.

He isolated individual words, first identifying them by their distinctive, spidery "waveform" traces on a computer screen, then boosting certain characteristics of the sound or slowing the playback to make out what was said. Owen independently corroborated Allen's work.

For hours on Thursday, first in Allen's dim, equipment-packed lab in Plainfield and later in Owen's more spacious, equally high-tech shop in nearby Colonia, the two men pored over the crucial recording segment just before the gunfire. They looped each word, playing it over and over, tweaking various controls and listening intently until they agreed on its meaning.

View full sizeSarah Rice, Special to The Plain DealerTom Owen "That's clear as a bell," Owen said at one point as he and Allen replayed the phrase "Prepare to fire" on two large wall-mounted loudspeakers.

The two audio engineers didn't add anything to the recording or fundamentally alter its contents. Instead, they boosted what was present to make it easier to hear. "It's like putting on eyeglasses," Owen said.

In addition to the prepare-to-fire command, the segment just before the gunfire contains several curiosities.

• There is a sound fragment milliseconds before the gunfire starts. Allen believes it could be the beginning of the word "Fire!" - just the initial "f" before the sound is overrun by the fusillade. Owen said he can't tell what the sound is.

• The frequency of the voice giving the command changes as the seconds pass. "I'm hearing a Doppler effect," Allen said, referring to the familiar pitch change that occurs as a siren passes. "It's as if he was facing one way and turned another," Owen said. That's consistent with eyewitness accounts that the Guardsmen spun around from the direction they had been marching just before they fired.

• The 1974 Bolt Beranek and Newman analysis concluded that the first three gunshots came from M1s, the World War II-vintage rifles carried by most of the Ohio Guardsmen. The M1 is a high-velocity weapon with a high-pitched gunshot sound.

But Allen and Owen said the initial three gunshots sound lower-pitched than the rest of the volley. "It suggests a lot of things, but we're not certified ballistics examiners," Owen said. Pistols typically are lower-velocity, lower-pitched weapons. Several Guard officers carried .45 caliber pistols, but the Bolt Beranek and Newman analysis identified .45-caliber fire later in the gunshot sequence, not among the first three shots.

As author William Gordon reported in his exhaustive 1995 book on the Kent State shootings, "Four Dead in Ohio," several witnesses told the FBI they saw a Guardsman with a pistol fire first, or appear to give a hand signal to initiate the firing. Gordon believes the firing command probably was non-verbal. A few students and Guardsmen claimed at the time that they heard something that sounded like an order to fire, but most of the soldiers who acknowledged using their weapons later testified that they acted spontaneously.

"This is a real game-changer," Gordon said Saturday of the new analysis. "If the results can be verified, it means the Guardsmen perjured themselves extensively at the trials.".

Without a known voice sample for comparison, the new analysis cannot answer the question of who issued the prepare-to-fire command.

Nor can it reveal why the order was given. Guardsmen reported being pelted by rocks as they headed up Blanket Hill and some said they feared for their safety, but the closest person in the crowd was 60 feet away and there is nothing on the tape to indicate what prompted the soldiers to reverse course, and for the ready-to-shoot command to go out.

Most of the senior Ohio National Guard officers directly in charge of the troops who fired on May 4, 1970 have since died. Ronald Snyder, a former Guard captain who led a unit that was at the Kent State protest but was not involved in the shootings, said Friday that the prepare-to-fire phrasing on the tape does not seem consistent with how military orders are given.

"I do know commands," Snyder said. "You would never see anything in training that would say 'Guard, do this.' It would be like saying, 'Army, do this.' It doesn't make sense."

Whether the prepare-to-fire order could lead to new legal action or a re-opened investigation of the Kent State shootings is unclear. A federal judge dismissed the charges against the eight indicted Guardsmen in 1974, saying the government had failed to prove its case. The surviving victims and families of the dead settled their civil lawsuit for $675,000 in 1979, agreeing to drop all future claims against the Guardsmen.

The federal acquittal means the soldiers could not be prosecuted again at the federal level, although a county or state official potentially could seek criminal charges, said Sanford Rosen, one of plaintiffs' attorneys in the civil lawsuit.

The legal issues would be complex, he said. The presence of a command could give rank-and-file Guardsmen a defense, since they could argue they were following an order.

The command's significance may be more historical than legal, Rosen said. "At very least, it puts new [focus] on the training and discipline of the Ohio Guard, and provides a lesson of how things should be done correctly when you are faced with civil disorder, particularly when you bring in troops."

In Pittsburgh, Doris Krause has been waiting 40 years to find out who killed her daughter Allison, and why. Now 84 and widowed, she said Friday the presence of the prepare-to-fire order doesn't surprise her.

"It had to be," she said. "There's no other way they could have turned in unison without a command. There's no other way they could fire at the same time."

She is frustrated, though, that the recording can't identify the person who gave the order. "I wish there was better proof," Krause said. "We have to find a man with enough courage to admit what happened.

"I'm an old lady," she said, "and before I leave this earth, I'd like to find out who said what is on that tape."

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/05/new_analysis_of_40-year-old_re.html

Welcome to the Kent May 4 Center

Last Updated on Saturday, 03 April 2010 19:10 Written by Kent May 4 Center Saturday, 20 February 2010 14:25

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Thank you for visiting the Kent May 4 Center.

We are preparing this site for the 40th anniversary of the Kent State May 4 1970 tragedy. Stay tuned here often as we add much important new content including 1970 photos & other important, overlooked, misunderstood evidence.

We are integrating the web site with various popular social networks to better facilitate updates of new and important information. Please consider sharing a link on your Facebook, Twitter or other social profile to help us pass the news about our new May4.Org web site.

Other new features implemented within the May4.Org website include: member forums, a photo gallery currently with over 200 educational 1970 photos (with several hundred more available here soon), a calendar of events, article commenting, incoming and outgoing Real Simple Syndicate (RSS) news feeds, a blog, a membership store and even more reasons to  join us and participate within the new May4.Org site.

You are encouraged to register for a free Kent May 4 Center internet membership or to subscribe to a donor membership of which ever level you desire to support.

1970 Kent State protest leader/casualty Alan Canfora has served as our Director on a volunteer basis since the founding of the Kent May 4 Center in 1989 while traveling extensively to give lectures and otherwise teach lessons learned from the  Kent State tragedy on May 4, 1970. 

The Kent May Center also is dedicated to raising educational awareness of the longstanding history of American Student Activism. We also encourage American students to be aware of this student activism history so modern students may join and build a new American Student Movement to promote positive social change.

 There is much more Alan Canfora and the Kent May 4 Center team can do -- but we need your help and contributions.

Please be aware the Kent May 4 Center is very serious as we prepare for future educational awareness campaigns. We have a growing team of internet experts and fund-raising consultants contributing toward reaching our goal of disseminating the worlds largest collection of information about the tragic 13 seconds at Kent State on May 4th 1970 and rebuilding the American student movement for positive social change.

So, stay tuned, spread the word, contribute...and JOIN US!

For truth, justice & freedom -- yesterday, today & tomorrow,

Alan Canfora, Director

Kent May 4 Center

Kent, Ohio

2010 NEWS FROM KENT: May 1-4 events

Last Updated on Tuesday, 04 May 2010 12:09 Written by Alan Canfora, KM4C Director Tuesday, 23 February 2010 20:47

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Kent May 4 Center Mission Statement

Last Updated on Sunday, 18 April 2010 05:10 Written by Alan Canfora Sunday, 23 April 1989 10:46

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The KENT MAY 4 CENTER is a non-profit educational charity based in Kent, Ohio. Since 1989, the KENT MAY 4 CENTER has been recognized by the state of Ohio and the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt, non-profit, educational charity organization.

We seek to provide information for students, scholars, researchers and news media.

Although the KENT MAY 4 CENTER was organized and incorporated in 1989, all members of the Board of Trustees of the KENT MAY 4 CENTER have been long-standing activists at Kent for many years prior to 1989. Alan Canfora, our volunteer KENT MAY 4 CENTER director since 1989, was among those wounded by Ohio National Guard bullets at Kent State on May 4, 1970.

Additionally, on an annual basis since the May 4 Task Force student organization was established at Kent State University in 1975, leaders of the KENT MAY 4 CENTER have assisted educational efforts and May 4 commemoration events sponsored by these dedicated Kent State University students.

Indeed, the KENT MAY 4 CENTER was established in 1989 as an attempt to address national off-campus educational goals in support of the students of the May 4 Task Force. Today, while we attempt to address our national educational goals, the KENT MAY 4 CENTER still actively supports the on-campus educational work of these dedicated students of the May 4 Task Force at Kent State University.

In these regards, the KENT MAY 4 CENTER continues to provide information in Ohio and throughout America concerning several important educational goals:

10-POINT PROGRAM of the KENT MAY 4 CENTER ***

1. education concerning the May 4, 1970, tragedy at Kent State University: four students were killed and nine other students were injured when members of the Ohio National Guard fired 67 gunshots into a crowd of unarmed students under the noonday sun during an anti-war demonstration;
2. education concerning other similar examples of excessive force: students were also shot dead at several other American campuses including Orangeburg College, Jackson State University, Southern University, the University of Kansas and elsewhere;
3. education concerning American student activism as an important contribution to positive social change: the longstanding tradition of American student activism and the crucial need for modern students to continue to promote positive social change on and off the campus;
4. education concerning the continued need for peaceful conflict resolution on the local, state & national levels: peaceful conflict resolution can prevent future tragedies similar to the 1970 Kent State situation & the war in Vietnam;
5. education as a means of truly healing the wounds that remain at Kent State and as a result of the war in Vietnam, including projects to benefit surviving Vietnam veterans & their families;
6. projects to benefit the parents & families of student martyrs at Kent State, Jackson State and elsewhere--as well as efforts to maintain effective communication and respectful relations with other victims of excessive force;
7. establishment of memorial educational scholarships in tribute to student martyrs at Kent State, Jackson State & other universities;
8. establishment of educational scholarships at Kent State University to support tuition & housing needs of members of the May 4 Task Force educational student organization in order to facilitate future annual May 4 commemoration events;
9. construction of significant memorials in tribute to student martyrs and/or victims of the war in Vietnam either in the city of Kent, Ohio, or on the Kent State University campus;
10. creation of a permanent, comprehensive educational center in Kent, Ohio.

*** The KENT MAY 4 CENTER is recognized as a tax-exempt, non-profit, educational charity according to section 501(c)(3) of the United States tax code by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) since 1989.

All donations to facilitate the above-mentioned goals of the KENT MAY 4 CENTER are therefore tax-exempt according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Please consider sending a tax-exempt donation in support of any or all of the above goals of the KENT MAY 4 CENTER. If you prefer, please specify which particular goal you choose to support.

Tax-exempt donations may be mailed to:

KENT MAY 4 CENTER
P.O.Box 3313
Kent, OH 44240

 or made on-line via PayPal: