[THS] Kent State: Ohio Guard was given an order to prepare to fire

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

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

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
May 09, 2010, 4:26PM

Owen and Allen 1.jpg
Sarah Rice, Special to The Plain Dealer

Forensic 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. [photo]

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.

Kent State University shootings May 4, 1970
View full size
John P. Filo, Valley Daily News
Mary 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."

This excerpt from a copy of Terry Strubbe's Kent State recording contains the order
for the Guard to prepare to fire. The word "Guard!" can be heard at 9.3 seconds. "All
right, prepare to fire" begins at 19.5 seconds. "Get down!" is spoken at 22.3 seconds.
The final "Guard!" is at 23.7 seconds, and the gunshots begin at 26 seconds.

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.

Experts have long history of deciphering sounds of crime

Kent State comes of age 40 years after shootings

Observance of shootings is part rememberance, part political rally

More Plain Dealer coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings

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.

Stuart Allen closeup.jpg
View full size
Sarah Rice, Special to The Plain Dealer Stuart 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.

Tom Owen closeup.jpgView full sizeSarah Rice, Special to The Plain Dealer
Tom 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."