Jeffrey Miller

Jeffrey Glenn Miller (March 28, 1950 – May 4, 1970) was an American student at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, when he was shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen in the Kent State shootings. Shortly before his death, in January 1970, Miller had transferred to Kent State from Michigan State University. While at Michigan State, Miller pledged Phi Kappa Tau fraternity where his older brother had been a member. He and his brother had always been close, and shared a birthday. After his brother graduated from Michigan State, Miller found himself feeling increasingly out of touch with those he knew at Michigan State. During the summer of 1969, an old friend from New York who attended Kent State urged Miller to consider transferring. He quickly adapted to Kent State and soon had many friends, including Allison Krause and Sandra Lee Scheuer who would both die with him on May 4.

Miller had taken part in the protests that day and had thrown a tear-gas canister back at the Ohio National Guardsmen who had originally fired it. The protests, initially against the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, had morphed into a protest against the presence of the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State campus. When he was shot, he was unarmed, and facing the Guardsmen while standing in an access road leading into the Prentice Hall parking lot at a distance of approximately 265 ft. A single bullet entered his open mouth and exited at the base of his posterior skull, killing him instantly. John Filo's iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, the most famous picture from the event, features fourteen-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over Miller's body.

Three other students were killed in the shootings: Allison Krause, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder. The shootings led to protests and a national student strike, causing hundreds of campuses to close because of both violent and non-violent demonstrations. The Kent State campus remained closed for six weeks. Five days after the shootings, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., against the war and protesting the killing of rioting students on a college campus.

Miller was cremated and his ashes placed in the mausoleum (Unit 7, Alcove H-O, Column O, Niche 1) at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. A memorial has been erected at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School, the school that replaced Miller's high school in Plainview, New York. Miller's mother had been a secretary to the principal of J.F. Kennedy H.S. in the 1960s. There is a Kent State Memorial Lecture Fund at MIT established in 1970 by one of Miller’s childhood friends. The university has also installed a memorial delineating the spot where Miller died.