MANSFIELD — Just a few days ago, Frank Foti’s wife turned to him and asked, “You know it’s been 50 years since that day at Kent?”
Foti considered the thought, incredulous. Had it really been half a century since the deadly anti-war demonstration on the university campus?
“We couldn’t believe it. I didn’t really realize it had been that long,” Foti told Richland Source on Sunday, one day before the anniversary of the shooting that was later dubbed “the day the war came home.”
“It was something that happened and something I witnessed in history. But it’s not something I think about every day.”
On May 4, 1970, four protesters at Kent State University were killed and nine others were injured after the National Guard opened fire on students during an anti-war demonstration on campus. An article in Life magazine called the shooting “a senseless and brutal murder at point-blank range.”
Frank Foti witnessed the entire event from a distance.
“It’s just a thing that should have never happened,” he said.
In the spring of 1970, Foti was in his second year at Kent State University studying business administration. A native of Cuyahoga Falls, he lived at his parents’ house and drove to campus for classes every day.
“It was a really fun time up until then, Foti said. “The first few years at Kent were fantastic.”
The year 1970 was full of unrest, five years after the first American combat troops set foot in Vietnam and involved the United States in the Vietnam War. Protests against American involvement in the war and the U.S. incursion into Cambodia started cropping up across the nation.
For weeks before that fateful day, Foti noticed a steady increase of chaos on Kent State’s campus. One day, Foti was walking to class when he came across a large crowd listening to a man talk. That man turned out to be Jerry Rubin, known as one of the “Chicago Seven” for his role in an anti-war demonstration that accompanied the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“I always remember, he was talking about our parents and how they contributed to the way society has come to the point it was at the time, and he said everybody should go home and kill their parents,” Foti said. “I always remembered that about him.”
Foti himself was never a protester, and said he’s “never really been a liberal.” While he didn’t agree with the war, he also had a brother who was a Marine fighting in Vietnam.
“I certainly wasn’t going to protest with him being over there,” Foti said.
The week before, Foti recalls the situation on campus getting progressively worse. A number of guardsmen and protesters were injured in clashes in the town of Kent and on campus. The ROTC building on campus was burned to the ground on Saturday, May 2, 1970.
That’s when Gov. James Rhodes requested the National Guard be deployed to help control crowds during a weekend of Vietnam War protests.
Another protest was planned for Monday, May 4, 1970 at Kent State. The gathering was banned by the university, but by noon as many as 3,000 people were gathered on the Commons. The National Guard ordered them to disperse. Most stayed; some chanted, shouted and threw rocks.
Foti recalls having lunch with his future wife Patricia that day; a year behind Foti in school, the two had met at a softball field in Akron when Patricia was working the concession stand at Firestone Stadium. While walking back from the student union, they saw the crowd.
“It was an illegal gathering, but of course they weren’t going to listen,” Foti recalled.
Guards fired tear gas at the crowd, but Foti said protestors would pick up the cans and throw them back. A line of guards moved forward with fixed bayonets, forcing the crowd to retreat up and over Blanket Hill toward Taylor Hall.
Foti watched from a hill in front of Taylor Hall as protesters were pushed towards a practice football field and a large parking lot, eventually boxed in by a fence.
“I couldn’t see that well where I was at…but that’s where it happened,” Foti said.
“We were standing there, and the National Guard started to turn around, then they immediately turned back and dropped to their knees, and for about 15 seconds the guns went off.”
At 12:24 p.m. on May 4, 1970, 28 guardsmen fired at the protesters: 67 shots in 13 seconds. Thirteen people were hit. Four died: Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer. Nine were wounded, one of them permanently paralyzed.
“At first everybody thought they were shooting blanks,” Foti said. “You could tell after that they weren’t blanks because people were yelling and screaming to get help.”
The closest person hit by a bullet was about 20 yards away, the farthest about 250 yards away.
“That area they were in, to use that type of military rifle, that was going to be very nasty,” Foti continued. “It was a narrow area back there and when they shot in there people were going to get hit, there’s no way nobody wasn’t going to get hit.
“The distance between protesters and the Guard was a very large distance, and they weren’t really in danger or being threatened at the time they decided to shoot.”
As the gunshots faded, the National Guard retreated back to the Commons. Foti recalls the crowd following the guardsmen back to the Commons; after being told to leave, one protester retorted, “If we don’t leave what are you going to do, shoot the rest of us?”
Foti said the confrontation only dissipated after a geology professor pleaded with the demonstrators for about 15 minutes to leave. At the same time, Foti and his friends decided to “get the heck out of there.”
The 13 shooting victims were all students at Kent State University. The school would close down that afternoon. Classes would not resume on campus until the summer session six weeks later. Foti finished the rest of his classes on TV thanks to a few local channels airing classes.
After the shooting, Foti worked at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company for a while before moving to Richland County around 1977. He joined the Lexington Police Department in 1982, then worked at the Mansfield Police Department from 1994 until he retired as a detective in 2011.
Foti and his wife have returned to Kent State University in the years since to visit the memorials for the victims that day. But he never returned as a student.
“I never went back to school after that,” he said. “I didn’t want to.”
