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Terrence Brooks Norman (born April 30, 1949) is a former Kent State University student and FBI informant whose alleged role in the Kent State shootings has been cloaked in mystery since the tragedy, which claimed the lives of four unarmed students at an anti-Vietnam War rally.
Norman was a Criminology [1] junior at the university on May 4, 1970, when soldiers from the Ohio National Guard suddenly opened fire on the crowd of students. Norman, who described himself as a "gung-ho" informant, [1] was present and armed at the rally while he photographed the demonstrators for the campus police and the FBI, a fact that was initially denied by both agencies but later confirmed. After the shooting, Sylvester Del Corso, the Ohio National Guard's top general, released a public statement that Norman had admitted firing four shots in self-defense. He later backed off from that statement, however.[ citation needed ]
There were several reasons why Norman is widely believed to have played a central role in the police action:
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The FBI squelched speculation regarding Norman's involvement by announcing that his gun had never been fired. However, the issue of his role on May 4 was revived three years later. Peter Davies, the author of the book The Truth About Kent State, and William A. Gordon, a journalist for the college's student newspaper and the future author of Four Dead in Ohio, reported that there were three additional witnesses who said they had heard either Norman admit "I had to shoot" or a Kent State police detective exclaim, "My God, he fires his gun four times. What the hell do we do now?"
In the wake of this new evidence, a Congressional subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department and the Justice Department itself began reviews of the case. Once news of the investigation broke, John Martin, the captain of one of the National Guard units that fired shots, came forward with the statements of his men, including one who thought he overheard Norman admit to shooting one person. That revelation in turn resulted in an accusation by Senator Birch Bayh that Norman may have been "the fatal catalyst" of the tragedy.
At the time Norman was accused of starting the Kent shootings, there were not any witnesses who actually saw him fire his .38 gun much less shoot a student. All the witnesses who thought they heard either Norman or the detective say that Norman had fired four shots had been at the university's ROTC building, approximately one hundred yards from the shooting.
After the accusations had been made, John Dunphy of the Akron Beacon Journal wrote several articles that seemed to exonerate Norman. Dunphy interviewed a new witness, Tom Masterson, who admitted he was the student who had attacked Norman. Masterson also supported Norman's claim that he had only drawn his gun after the shootings and in self-defense.
An audio analysis commissioned by the Justice Department of the 67 shots fired that day appeared to further exonerate Norman. The analysis, performed for the Justice Department by the Massachusetts firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman (the same firm that discovered the 181⁄2 minute gap in the Nixon tapes), concluded that three shots preceded the 13-second volley, all were fired by M-1 rifles carried by the Guardsmen, and there was such a short period of time between the first three shots and the sustained 13-second volley, a shot from one individual could not have triggered the others.
Yet unanswered questions remain. Norman subsequently admitted to positioning himself between the Guardsmen and the protestors and throwing rocks at the students. He claimed to have thrown two or three rocks, but Masterson put the number at closer to "half a dozen, a dozen". Captain John Martin said that he had also noticed Norman throwing rocks and had asked himself, "What is this idiot doing?" It is unclear whether Norman acted at the behest of the agencies to whom he reported — the university police and the FBI — or whether he acted on his own.
It is also unclear why the FBI initially lied to the public when it claimed to have no relationship with Norman, and why the Bureau announced that his gun had never been fired. An FBI lab report surfaced which indicated that Norman's pistol had been fired since its last cleaning. However, the lab was unable to ascertain when or where the gun had most recently been discharged.
In a 2004 Tampa Tribune story, former Cleveland Plain Dealer writer Janis Froelich examined Norman's life since the shooting. According to the article, Norman had lived in three states and held several different jobs. Froelich located Norman in 2006 living in North Carolina and working as a car salesman.[ citation needed ]
In 2006, James Renner, current[ when? ] editor of the Cleveland Independent newspaper, described Norman in the Free Times as a possible agent provocateur. Renner stated, "I think he was hired by the FBI to incite instability within SDS." [2]
In 2007 Alan Canfora, one of the nine wounded students, located a copy of a tape of the shootings in a library archive. The original 30-minute, reel-to-reel tape was made by Terry Strubbe, a Kent State communications student who turned on his recorder and put its microphone in his dorm window overlooking the campus. A 2010 audio analysis of a tape recording of the incident by Stuart Allen and Tom Owen, who were described by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as "nationally respected forensic audio experts," concluded that the guardsmen were given an order to fire. It is the only known recording to capture the events leading up to the shootings.
Allen continued to study the tape and also found that someone had fired four shots some 70 seconds prior to the National Guardsmen opening fire. The evidence appears to implicate Norman as the shooter. [3] The state of Ohio and the U.S. Justice Department declined to review the new evidence.[ citation needed ]
Donald David DeFreeze, also known as Cinque Mtume and using the nom de guerre "General Field Marshal Cinque", was known as the "spokesman" of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small, American far-left group that formed in Oakland, California in 1973. Some analysts suggested he was a figurehead; others said he was the leader. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, he dropped out of high school and was involved from the age of 14 in frequent brushes with the criminal justice system. He received generous probation in the late 1960s, leading some sources to suggest he was serving as a police informant to the Los Angeles Police Department.
Jeffrey Glenn Miller was an American student at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, who was killed by the Ohio Army National Guard in the Kent State shootings. He had been protesting against the invasion of Cambodia and the presence of the National Guard on the Kent State campus. National Guardsmen opened fire on a group of unarmed students, killing Miller and three others.
Sandra Lee "Sandy" Scheuer was a student at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, when she was killed by Ohio National Guardsmen in the Kent State shootings.
The Jackson State killings occurred on Friday, May 15, 1970, at Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi. On May 14, 1970, city and state police confronted a group of students outside a campus dormitory. Shortly after midnight, the police opened fire, killing two students and injuring twelve. The event happened 11 days after the Kent State shootings, in which National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest against the Vietnam War. The Kent State event had first captured national attention.
The Orangeburg Massacre was a shooting of student protesters that took place on February 8, 1968, on the campus of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, South Carolina, United States. Nine Highway Patrolmen and one city police officer opened fire on a crowd of African American students, killing three and injuring twenty-eight. The shootings were the culmination of a series of protests against racial segregation at a local bowling alley, marking the first instance of police killing student protestors at an American university.
Allison Beth Krause was a student at Kent State University and one of four unarmed students shot and killed by soldiers of the Ohio Army National Guard in the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings in Kent, Ohio. The shootings occurred as students protested against both the invasion of Cambodia and the National Guard presence on campus.
William Knox Schroeder was a student at Kent State University, Ohio, when he was killed by Ohio National Guardsmen in the Kent State shootings.
The Hough riots were riots in the predominantly African-American community of Hough in Cleveland, Ohio, United States which took place from July 18 to 23, 1966. During the riots, four African Americans were killed and 50 people were injured. There were 275 arrests and numerous incidents of arson and firebombings. City officials at first blamed black nationalist and communist organizations for the riots, but historians generally dismiss these claims today, arguing that the cause of the Hough Riots were primarily poverty and racism. The riots caused rapid population loss and economic decline in the area, which lasted at least five decades after the riots.
The Glenville shootout was a gun battle that occurred on the night of July 23–24, 1968, in the Glenville section of Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States. Gunfire was exchanged for roughly four hours between the Cleveland Police Department and the Black Nationalists of New Libya, a Black Power group. The battle led to the death of three policemen, three suspects, and a bystander. At least 15 others were wounded.
LeRoy Martin Satrom was an American politician and engineer in Portage County, Ohio. He served as county engineer, city engineer, city councilman, and mayor. Satrom is most remembered for his 1970–1972 tenure as mayor of Kent, Ohio, specifically for his request for National Guard assistance in the events leading up to the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings, where four students were killed and nine wounded. He later served four terms as Portage County engineer, and retired in 1988.
The Ohio National Guard comprises the Ohio Army National Guard and the Ohio Air National Guard. The commander-in-chief of the Ohio Army National Guard is the governor of the U.S. state of Ohio. If the Ohio Army National Guard is called to federal service, then the President of the United States becomes the commander-in-chief. The military commander of all forces in the State of Ohio is the Adjutant General, Major General John C. Harris, Jr. is responsible for the command of 17,000 members, preparedness and readiness, installation management, and budget of the Ohio National Guard. The current Assistant Adjutant General for Army, with responsibility for overseeing the Ohio Army National Guard training and operations, is Brigadier General Thomas E. Moore II. The current Assistant Adjutant General for Air is Major General James R. Camp with responsibility for overseeing the Ohio Air National Guard.
Frank Joseph Battisti was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. Battisti's career featured groundbreaking—and sometimes controversial—rulings, notably his finding in 1976 that the Cleveland public school system was guilty of racial segregation. Two years earlier, in 1974, he dismissed a case against eight members of the Ohio Army National Guard accused of violating the civil rights of four Kent State University students who were shot dead in 1970. In the 1980s, he presided over a high-profile case involving Cleveland autoworker John Demjanjuk, who was deported amid charges that he committed war crimes in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. During his decades as a jurist, Battisti was honored by various professional and civic organizations, but he was also a target of criticism.
Daniel John Patrick Greene was an American mobster in Cleveland, Ohio, whose conflicts with the Cleveland crime family of the Italian-American Mafia ended in Greene's murder in 1977.
A contagious shooting is a sociological phenomenon observed in police personnel, in which one person firing on a target can induce others to begin shooting without knowing why they are firing. The term may have been coined, but certainly rose to prominence in public discourse in the aftermath of the killing of Amadou Diallo by the NYPD in 1999.
The Kent State shootings were the killing of four and wounding of nine unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State University campus. The shootings took place on May 4, 1970, during a rally opposing the expanding involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia by United States military forces as well as protesting the National Guard presence on campus and the draft.
The SuccessTech Academy shooting was a school shooting that occurred on October 10, 2007, at the SuccessTech alternative high school in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Fourteen-year-old freshman Asa H. Coon shot two students and two teachers before committing suicide on the fourth floor of the building.
On the morning of February 27, 2012, six students were shot at Chardon High School in Chardon, Ohio, resulting in the deaths of three of them. Witnesses said that the shooter had a personal rivalry with one of his victims. Two other wounded students were also hospitalized, one of whom sustained several serious injuries that have resulted in permanent paralysis. The fifth student suffered a minor injury, and the sixth a superficial wound.
This is a bibliography on the Kent State shootings. External links to reports, news articles and other sources of information may also be found below.
On November 22, 2014, Tamir E. Rice, a 12-year-old African American boy, was killed in Cleveland, Ohio, by Timothy Loehmann, a 26-year-old white police officer. Rice was carrying a replica toy gun; Loehmann shot him almost immediately upon arriving on the scene. Two officers, Loehmann and 46-year-old Frank Garmback, were responding to a police dispatch call regarding a male who had a gun. A caller reported that a male was pointing "a pistol" at random people at the Cudell Recreation Center, a park in the City of Cleveland's Public Works Department. At the beginning of the call and again in the middle, he says of the pistol "it's probably fake." Toward the end of the two-minute call the caller states that "he is probably a juvenile", but the dispatcher did not relay either of these statements to Loehmann and Garmback.
Meyer “Mike” Alewitz is an educator, agitprop artist, mural painter, and political activist, working both in the United States and internationally. His use of art to lobby for workers’ rights has fostered numerous controversies. His approach has been described as “ideally suited to the postmodern and post-state socialist era, when everything rebellious must be created anew and when ‘culture' along with ‘labor’ are urgently needed to salvage a world from eco-disaster, perpetual war, and the plundering of human possibility.”
