Sandra Lee "Sandy" Scheuer (; August 11, 1949 – May 4, 1970) was a student at
Kent State University in
Kent,
Ohio, when she was killed by
Ohio National Guardsmen in the
Kent State shootings.
Background
Scheuer was born in
Youngstown, Ohio, the daughter of Sarah (Lacko) and Martin Scheuer.
She had an older sister, Audrey. She was Jewish. She was an honors student in
speech therapy
Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if they are th ...
, and was a graduate of
Boardman High School. She did not take part in the
Vietnam War protests that preceded the shootings. She was shot in the neck with an
M-1 rifle from a distance of 130 yards (119 m) while walking between classes. The bullet severed her
jugular vein and she died within five or six minutes from
loss of blood. According to the account of her boyfriend Bruce Burkland, Scheuer "was walking with one of her speech and hearing therapy students across the green. Caught in the gunfire, neither Sandra nor the young man had anything to do with the assembly of students on the green."
Three other unarmed students were also killed in the shootings:
Allison Krause
Allison Beth Krause ( ; April 23, 1951 – May 4, 1970) was an American honor student at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, when she was killed by soldiers of the Ohio Army National Guard in the Kent State shootings, while protesting against ...
,
Jeffrey Miller, 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.
Scheuer had been a member of the
Alpha Xi Delta sorority, and current members of this sorority speak in her memory each year on the Kent State University campus at the May 4 Task Force's commemoration of the 1970 tragedy.
In 2018 an exhibit in memory of Scheuer called "Sandy's Scrapbook," based on an actual scrapbook she kept while attending Kent State, opened at the University's May 4 Visitor Center.
In popular culture
Just after Scheuer's death, the English songwriter
Harvey Andrews composed a song titled "Hey Sandy", whose lyrics are addressed to her:
In the song "
Ohio", which was written immediately after the shootings, folk rocker
Neil Young made a reference to Scheuer in the chorus:
Scheuer is also remembered in Canadian poet
Gary Geddes
Gary Geddes (born 9 June 1940 in Vancouver, British Columbia) is a Canadian poet and writer.
Biography
He spent four years of his childhood on the Canadian prairies, but otherwise remained on the west coast until 1963, where he got his bachelor's ...
' poem "Sandra Lee Scheuer", found in his 1980 collection ''The Acid Test''. An image of a memorial to Scheuer was included in the CD case to ''
The Argument'' (2001) by
Fugazi
Fugazi (; ) is an American post-hardcore band that formed in Washington, D.C., in 1986. The band consists of guitarists and vocalists Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto, bassist Joe Lally, and drummer Brendan Canty. They are noted for their style-tr ...
.
References
Further reading
* Jedick, Peter (2006). "Rawls' Death Brings Back Sad Memory." Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), February 13, 2006, D3.
External links
*
Sandy Scheuer: May 4 Archive
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scheuer, Sandra Lee
1949 births
1970 deaths
American people of the Vietnam War
20th-century American Jews
Kent State University alumni
Kent State shootings
People from Youngstown, Ohio
Deaths by firearm in Ohio