Many of us easily remember May 4, 1970, the day four unarmed college students were killed on their own campus, or at the very least the photo taken of the event. The photo by John Filo won the Pulitzer Prize of Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway, kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller minutes after he was fatally shot by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.
For Elaine Holstein, however, the photograph depicted the cruel death of her beloved 20-year-old son.
Holstein died on Saturday at age 96; she had been the last surviving parent of the four Kent State victims.
An interesting aside that I never knew was that three of those four students were Jewish; nine other students also were wounded in the gunfire.
In 1970 Jeff became a student at Kent State, as a transfer from Michigan State University.
“Two days later,” Holstein recalled, “Jeff called me in my office. He was concerned I might hear about more demonstrations and get nervous about it, and he wanted to reassure me. He mentioned Nixon’s speech calling the anti-war students ‘bums,’ and the impression I got wasn’t so much of anger, but of wry amusement. There was going to be a rally at noon, and he said ‘I think I’ll go over there; is that OK with you?’ I thought, what power do I have to tell him no, from Long Island?
And that was the last conversation that the two had.
Holstein, who was divorced from Jeff’s father Bernard, heard about the shootings on the radio as she drove home from work, and thought to herself, “I’m going to call Jeff and tell him to come home and wait until this blows over.” She dialed his number at college; a young man answered, and she asked to speak with Jeff. After a pause, he said, “He’s dead.”
More of the story can be found here.