Revisiting Kent State
John Filo, now a Newsweek photo editor, took the Pulitzer Prize-winning image that captured public horror at the shooting of four antiwar protesters at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. This year, on the 25th anniversary of the killings, Filo met his subject, Mary Ann Vecchio Gillium, for the first time. "I had looked at her face hundreds of times as it emerged in my developing tray," he recalls. "When we met, I was amazed at how little her face had changed. We hugged. We talked. I listened as she emotionally recounted the experience, when she was just a 14-year-old runaway. We saw the same horrible scenes. In my helplessness that day, all I could do was take pictures. In her helplessness, all there was to do was cry out."
