Pattie Hadley Hines snapped this photo of Jeffrey Miller after she and 1970 Lakeview High School classmate Denise Dan Litton picked him up hitchhiking when they got lost on their way home from Cleveland. About three weeks later, Miller was one of the students killed in the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State University. Last month, after 51 years, Litton confirmed that the photo in her album was the same Jeffrey Miller, and Miller's older brother, Russ, now has a print of it hanging on his wall. (Courtesy May 4 Collection, Kent State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives)

Denise Dan Litton was a 17-year-old Lakeview High School senior that night in 1970 when she and classmate Pattie Hadley Hines picked up the “cute” hitchhiker.

“Back then everybody picked up people hitchhiking,” she said. “We used to hitchhike, too.”

With Litton’s ever-present camera, Hines snapped a shot of their hitchhiker as he flipped through one of Litton’s photo albums in the back seat of her 1962 Chevy Biscayne.

Three weeks later, on May 4, the hitchhiker, Jeffrey Miller, was the subject of another photo — the image of Miller lying facedown while a kneeling teen screams over his body became the iconic shot of what was known as the Kent State Massacre. Miller was one of four students killed — nine others were wounded — when the National Guard fired 67 rounds, hitting advancing protesters as well as students watching the demonstration from a distance and others walking to and from classes.

“Several months after the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings, we learned that the student we picked up could possibly be one of those killed,” Litton said two weeks ago. “For many years, I would pull the picture out and tell the story, never really verifying he was certainly that Jeffrey Miller.

“I thought if this is Jeff Miller, his mother would love to have this picture.” She sighed. “Time got away. I never really was prompted to do it.”

The prompting came from Scott Coughenour, a friend from her youth now living in Vietnam, where he was a teacher. When she posted the photo on her Facebook on May 4 of this year, Coughenour urged Litton to contact Kent State. Now!

May 4 Archivist Liz Campion of the Special Collections and Archives at the KSU library “knew immediately it was him and shared the photo with his brother, Russ,” Litton said.

“Russ then contacted me (on May 6) and was thrilled to see it and hear of the story. He said he sobbed after hearing and seeing it. We have since spoken several times.”

An enlarged copy of Litton and Hines’ photo now hangs in Russell Miller’s home in Michigan.

“It was thrilling. It was totally thrilling,” the 74-year-old retired engineer said. “It shows the Jeff I remember. Fifty-one years later. Absolutely thrilling!”

GETTING LOST

Litton, a retired claims examiner for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services now living in Geneva-on-the-Lake, remembered: “A friend and I were driving home from Cleveland and became lost. We were only 17 and just starting to drive. We were dating a couple guys in a Cleveland band called The Damnation of Adam Blessing.

“We saw this cute guy hitchhiking and picked him up. He said he was going to Kent, and we were happy to take him there as we knew our way back from there.”

Hines, now a retired Jamestown Industries inspector living in Fowler, said, “He was a very pleasant young man.”

She said that after more than 50 years, she can’t remember why she took the hitchhiker’s photo. “I took a lot of pictures back then. I don’t remember if it was my camera or Denise’s.”

Litton said it was her camera and that’s how she ended up with the photo for all those decades.

“After the Kent State shootings and things were settling down, my friend Pattie remembered our hitchhiker told us his name was Jeff Miller. We assumed he was one of the four killed but never knew positively,” Litton said.

“It took us a while to realize it was the same young man,” Hines said.

Coughenour, a friend of the Cortland girls back then, has kept in touch by Facebook since moving to Vietnam 12 years ago. This year, he shared a post about the teen pictured with Miller in the iconic May 4 photo.

“I’m living in Vietnam — the country the U.S. was waging war against and the cause of the demonstration — and post an article about Mary Ann Vecchio on my Facebook Page,” Coughenour said in an email.

“Denise responds and posts her photo of Jeff Miller. Denise then explained to me how she happened to have this photo. I sent her the phone number and email of the KSU Visitors Center and encouraged her to send an email including the photo and request any contact info they had for Jeff’s older brother, Russell,” he wrote. “Kent State was excited to learn of the existence of the photo, as was Russell, as you can well imagine.”

Litton said, “They (Miller’s family) didn’t have a recent photo of Jeff. They had his graduation photo (from three years earlier), but it didn’t show his personality.

“It sure made Russ happy.”

A BROTHER REMEMBERS

“It was thrilling,” Miller said during a phone call from his home in Michigan. The Miller brothers grew up in Plainview on Long Island, N.Y. Jeff was still in high school when big brother Russ went off to Michigan State University.

“In the next three years, the whole world changed,” Miller said.

“As a college student, I had a deferment from the draft. After graduating in 1969, I still had a deferment because I went to work in the medical devices field,” he said. “In 1970 … all deferments went away.”

His straight-laced little brother also was changing.

“In 1969, 1970, he grew his hair long and became politically minded. He accused me of being a capitalist while he was an activist.” Miller chuckled. “It was all in good fun.”

Cellphones, selfies and instant photos of everything everywhere weren’t a thing in the late 1960s. “I had no pictures of him from that period, 1968, ’69, ’70. We had a couple crazy pictures from the riot. That wasn’t the Jeff I knew.”

The image of Jeff as a friendly hitchhiker leafing through a stranger’s photos was.

Besides having an enlarged print in his home, Miller shared the photo on his Facebook page for the world to see “the Jeff I remember.”

EVERY FEW YEARS

It’s not the first pleasant surprise he’s received over the last 51 years. “Every once in a while, something new pops up,” Miller said.

Jeff had transferred from Michigan State to Kent in January 1970, and Russ said that for decades, he hadn’t realized that Jeff knew any of the other three students killed on May 4. “And it turns out that he might have been dating one,” Miller said.

In 2007, Janice Reinstein Stone, who had been a roommate of Sandra J. Scheuer of Boardman donated to the archives a crayon drawing that she tucked away for years. It’s a colorful abstract piece on 8.5-by-11-inch paper that Scheuer and Jeff Miller had created together. The piece titled “Who Is To Say?” is signed by both of them.

In a written narrative accompanying the artwork, Stone says that on a Friday night about two weeks before the shootings, “they asked to use my crayons and paper. They sat down on the floor of Sandy’s bedroom having a good old time giggling and scribbling.”

Stone said that Jeffrey Miller and Scheuer were dating at the time but did not go to the May 4 rally together. She and Scheuer went to see what was happening and maybe find Jeff, Stone said. They didn’t locate him among the protesters, and when the situation started to get tense, Scheuer decided to leave. Stone said a few minutes later she left also, heading a different direction.

Then she heard a barrage of gunfire.

Miller was hit while in the driveway leading to the Prentice Hall parking lot. Scheuer fell a distance away, more than halfway through the parking lot. It did not appear that they had seen each other through the thick crowd of 300-some protesters and several hundred onlookers and students passing through.

Russ Miller said he takes comfort in that his brother had met someone special, knowing there was joy in Jeff’s final days. As the years go by and as he makes more trips to May 4 memorial events, more people open up and share memories, which paint a fuller picture of Jeff’s vitality, passion and kindness, Miller said.

And now, thanks to two girls from Cortland who picked up a hitchhiker after getting lost driving home, he has a happy photo of his little brother from 1970.

THE COLLECTION

Litton and Hines’ photo, as well as the Miller and Scheuer artwork and a plethora of other documents and artifacts now are part of the May 4 Collection in the Kent State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives.

“Currently, the Special Collections and Archives reading room is closed, and all in-person services are suspended at this time,” Campion said. “We anticipate reopening at the end of the summer semester.”

In the meantime, the collection can be viewed on the archives website, https://www.library.kent.edu/special-collections-and-archives/kent-state-shootings-may-4-collection.