The morbid Kent State group of bullet recipients is shrinking again.
Jim Russell died of a heart attack in 2007. Robbie Stamps died of pneumonia in 2008. Alan Canfora died five years ago making it seven survivors then.
Now, it’s John Cleary who has gone, making it five who remain.
Of course the “four dead in Ohio” have bullets in them too. But they were dead the day they were shot. They never were survivors: Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, Bill Schroeder and Jeffrey Miller. Two of them were 19 years old. The other two were 20.
They never got to be 74 like John Cleary who died of pancreatic cancer.
“John Cleary, wounded at Kent State, is dead at 74″ the New York Times obituary headline read ons Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025.
The obituary says Cleary was an architecture student taking pictures of the protest that day. He had just wound his camera when the bullet slammed into him from a guardsman’s rifle.
His face was on the cover of Life magazine the week after the Kent State shootings May 4, 1970.
Life Magazine covers were huge and glossy in bright color and in every news stand and grocery store in America.
The title “LIFE” in huge letters dominated the cover in the upper left, but “death” would have been a better title that week of May 4, 1970.
John Cleary was lying on his back on the hillside outside Taylor Hall where Ohio National Guardsmen turned in unison and fired into the crowd of student protestors. It almost seemed choreographed their turn was so unified.
Students hovered around John Cleary trying to comfort him until an ambulance arrived. The bullet hit him “like a sledgehammer” in the stomach, the obituary quotes him as saying.
He is white as sheet in the photo, but looked handsome even in that pallid condition, stereotype of an American college kid.
Ten feet away Jeffrey Miller lay on his face, blood pouring out of his shattered skull trickling down the asphalt driveway collecting at the curb.
That is where I was standing a few minutes after the shootings as a graduate student and dorm counselor observing the aftermath of the shootings.
I didn’t even notice John Cleary then. Chaos and screaming from dozens of students made mayhem.
Some faculty, especially Professor Glenn Frank and Professor Mike Lunine, were begging students to leave the scene, fearing guardsmen might shoot again.
I said the morbid club of Kent State bullet recipients has dwindled.
No number of guardsmen shooters is known but 61-67 bullets were fired in 13 seconds.
But if you look at the famous photo under the cement pagoda, it sure looks like around 20 guardsmen are firing their rifles, and one his hand gun.
Some say it is only on a guardsman’s death that we will ever find out what really prompted the shooting May 4, 1970.
I wondered if the morbid club of guardsmen was shrinking too after 55 years like the Kent State morbid recipients of their bullets is shrinking.
Google says no one has kept records of the guardsmen who fired that day. No one knows if they live or have died. If there is to be a deathbed moment of truth, it may never be recognized.
So goes history.
Paul Keane is a Connecticut native who attended Kent State when the shooting occured, is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and retired Vermont teacher.