Mary Ann Vecchio

Mary Ann Vecchio (born December 4, 1955) is an American respiratory therapist and one of two subjects in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by photojournalism student John Filo during the immediate aftermath of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970.

The photograph depicts the 14-year-old Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller, who had been fatally shot by the Ohio National Guard moments earlier.

Vecchio had joined the protest while visiting the campus, where she befriended two of the other students who would be hit by gunfire that day: Sandra Scheuer, who was killed, and Alan Canfora, who was wounded in the right wrist.

Vecchio was from an Italian immigrant family who lived in Opa-locka, Florida, where she attended Westview Junior High School at the beginning of 1970.

She states that her home life was volatile, and that she and her siblings would leave the house for long periods when their parents fought.

Vecchio soon got in trouble for smoking marijuana and skipping school.

In February 1970, the police told Vecchio, then 14 years old, that they would send her to jail if she skipped school again.

She then ran away from home.

Vecchio says that she was not rebelling or intending to make a political statement: "I just wanted to be anywhere that wasn't Opa-locka."

Vecchio began hitchhiking her way across the country, sleeping in fields and hippie crash pads with other transient youth, while occasionally working odd jobs for food.

On May 4, 1970, Vecchio was at Kent State University in northern Ohio.

On April 30, President Richard Nixon had announced a U.S. invasion into Cambodia and students were having an anti-war protest.

As she walked towards a field on campus where protesters were gathering, Vecchio struck up a conversation with a male student.

The two watched as a student waving a black flag taunted a line of the Ohio Army National Guard, who seemed to fall back and then fired more than 60 shots at the students.

Vecchio dropped to the ground during the firing.

When she looked up, the student she had been talking to, Jeffrey Miller, lay beside her, shot through the mouth.

She fell to her knees by his body, though nearby students appeared too stunned or confused to react.

The other photos released 49 years later show Vecchio running to Miller's body from a distance, she was not with him when he was shot (see Getty file of photos by John Filo).

Vecchio recalls crying, "Doesn't anyone see what just happened here? Why is no one helping him?"

Three other students lay dead nearby.

Vecchio remembers running from the scene until she saw National Guardsmen herding students onto a bus.

Dazed and wanting to get away, she got on the bus, which drove two hours to Columbus, Ohio, where parents were waiting for their children who were attending Kent State.

Vecchio, who had never heard of the city of Columbus before arriving, wandered the streets looking for food and shelter.

Student photographer John Filo, who was taking photos of the protest, had narrowly avoided being shot.

After rising to his feet, he saw a girl drop to her knees by a body on the ground ten feet away.

He said, "I knew the boy was dead, but I could tell she didn't know. I could see something building in her, and all of a sudden she lets out this scream and I shoot. I shoot one more picture, and I'm out of film."

When he saw the National Guard cutting electric wires on campus, Filo ran to his car, hid the film inside his hubcap, and drove two hours to the offices of his hometown newspaper Valley Daily News in Tarentum, Pennsylvania to develop the film.

He sent his photo by wire to the Associated Press and the next morning it appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world.

Filo identified the girl simply as "coed."

Vecchio cannot recall the first time that she saw the photo, sometimes called the Kent State Pietà.

Decades later, Filo would state, "It was because she was 14, because of her youth, that she ran to help, that she ran to do something. There were other people, 18, 19, 20 years old, who didn't get close to the body. She did because she was a kid. She was a kid reacting to the horror in front of her. Had she not been 14, the picture wouldn't have had the impact it did."

Vecchio hitchhiked out of Columbus.

She had heard that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking for the girl in the photo, so she didn't tell anyone who she was, imagining that she could disappear if she got to California.

However, another child at a crash pad in Indianapolis recognized her and tipped off a reporter at The Indianapolis Star.

Vecchio talked to the reporter, hoping he would give her bus fare to get to California.

Instead, he reported her to local police, who detained her in juvenile detention as a runaway before sending her back to Opa-locka.

She said, "I would have stayed anonymous forever. But that guy from the Indianapolis Star, he knocked out my future."

Following publication of the photograph through the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review satellite paper Valley Daily News and its subsequent pickup internationally, Florida governor Claude Kirk labelled Vecchio a dissident Communist, stating that she was "part of a nationally organized conspiracy of professional agitators" that was "responsible for the students’ death."

Many people refused to believe that Vecchio, who was nearly six feet tall, was actually 14.

She was followed whenever she left her house by reporters and hecklers, and the family received many death threats.