Terry Norman

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Terrence Brookes Norman (b. 1949) was an American university student involved in the Kent State shootings.

Norman was a part-time junior at Kent State University when soldiers from the Ohio National Guard killed four students and wounded others during a May 4, 1970 protest. Norman was present at the protest and was photographing the demonstrators for both 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 claiming that Norman had admitted firing four shots at the demonstrators in self-defense. He later backed off from that statement.

Several apparent facts drew suspicion to Norman:

Norman was the only person on campus other than a Guardsman known to have been armed with a weapon;
The Guard continued to claim that a single shot of unknown origin preceded the 13-second volley of gunfire; and
There had been a previous and never-fully-explained incident on Blanket Hill in which Norman drew his gun and pointed it at students. Norman had scuffled with some fellow students and drawn his gun before being chased by several men across the campus to the campus police and National Guard. One of his pursuers, graduate student Harold Reid, yelled, "Stop that man! He has a gun."

The FBI put an end to speculation by announcing that Norman's 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 admitting, "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 began a new investigation of the case. Once news of the investigation broke, John Martin, the captain of one of the National Guard units that fired, came forward with the statement of one of his soldiers who thought he overheard Norman admit shooting a person. That revelation 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 made contact with a new witness, Tom Masterson, who said 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.

A Justice Department study of the 68 shots fired at Kent that day appeared to further exonerate Norman. The analysis, performed by the Massachusetts firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman (the same firm that discovered the 18 1/2 minute gap in the Nixon tapes), concluded that three shots preceded the 13-second volley; that all were fired by M-1 rifles carried by the Guardsmen; and that there was such a short period of time between the first three shots and the sustained 13-second volley that a shot from one individual could not have triggered the others.

There are still unanswered questions about Norman's role in the incident. Norman 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 was acting on the behest of his employers in the campus police or FBI, or acting on his own accord.

It is also unclear why the FBI initially lied to the public when it claimed to have no relationship with Norman, and why they had announced that his gun had never been fired, when the FBI lab report indicated that it had been fired since its last cleaning. The lab was unable to ascertain where or when the gun had been fired.

A 2006 Tampa Tribune article by Janet Froelich examined Norman's life since the shooting. According to the article, Norman has lived in about seven states and has held as many different jobs. At one point, he had been convicted of embezzlement, a felony that had hindered his ability to gain employment in his chosen field of law enforcement. Froelich located Norman and his wife in Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina.