While at Michigan State, Miller pledged Phi Kappa Tau fraternity[6] where his older brother, Russell, had been a member.

[7] 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.

[8] Miller was unarmed when he was shot; he had been facing the Guardsmen while standing in an access road leading into the Prentice Hall parking lot at a distance of approximately 265 feet (81 m).

[10] John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo features Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway, kneeling over Miller's dead body.

[11] Three other students were shot and killed at Kent State on the day: Allison Krause, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder; nine others were wounded, including one who was paralyzed for life.

Five days after the shootings, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., against the war and the military–industrial complex and protesting the killing of unarmed student protestors by American soldiers on a college campus.