On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on anti-war demonstrators on the campus of Kent State University, killing Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer, all Kent State students in good standing. The subsequent investigation found that 61 rounds were fired by 28 guardsmen in the space of 13 seconds. Nine students were wounded in the attack in addition to the fatalities.
Several guardsmen later testified that they feared for their lives even though the crowd of 200 to 300 protesters was unarmed and the nearest victim was over 70 feet away. The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, appointed by President Richard Nixon, concluded that the shooting was unjustified and stated, “Even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was not a danger that called for lethal force.”
It is hard to fathom what danger ICE agents in Minneapolis thought they faced from Renee Good when pulling away in her Honda Pilot. The Wall Street Journal reports that the use-of-force policy of the Department of Justice forbids its own agents from firing at a moving vehicle unless it poses a threat of death or serious injury, “and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.” The evidence thus far made public makes it very hard for any reasonable person to conclude that the agent in question followed that policy.
The initial claim by President Donald Trump that Good “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer” is not even remotely true, as anyone who has seen the video must know. That Good should be vilified as a “domestic terrorist” by officials of the administration only shows their complete moral bankruptcy.
The administration’s portrayal of this mother of three stands in stunning contrast to that of Becca Good, her widow. In her statement released after her wife’s killing, Becca Good said of her wife, “Renee lived by an overarching belief: There is kindness in the world, and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow. Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: We are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.”
It was in her effort to keep her immigrant neighbors safe that Renee Good unintentionally sacrificed her own life. The scary thing is that this does not appear to be the one-off action of a wayward federal agent. Given the number of similar incidents involving ICE around the country, including recently in Portland, we must consider that this particular agent was doing what he was trained to do, and that may include using deadly force against anyone who dares to challenge them.
During the Washington DC protests in June 2020, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper reports that Trump asked him, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Federal law prevents active military troops from doing such, but it appears the president has found those willing to do just that.
A retired police officer told me that what worries him is that the administration refuses to back down from its confrontational policies, and that this kind of tragedy is bound to keep happening.
Photographer John Filo captured the horror of the Kent State massacre in his Pulitzer-winning photo of 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio wailing over the lifeless body of Jeffrey Miller. That tragic event was one of the major turning points in public opinion against the Vietnam War. In the months that followed, over 4 million students on campuses across the country joined in protests and strikes against the war. A banner hung by students at New York University summed up the sentiment of many, reading, “They can’t kill us all.”
If there is any hope that our democracy will not be destroyed by the willingness of the administration to use violence against the people they are supposed to serve, then this must be our Kent State moment. Speak out, join the protests and keep each other safe, to the extent possible in these times. They can’t kill us all.
Dan Bryant is a retired minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a resident of Eugene since 1991.