The girl screaming in a familiar image taken after the Kent State shootings reunited on campus Monday with the man who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, the Associated Press reports, crediting an Akron Beacon Journal story.

The Beacon Journal story by Bill Lilley reports:

“Inextricably linked by the annals of history for the past 39 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John Filo and his subject, Mary Vecchio, were reunited Tuesday at Kent State University.

The last time he saw her on the campus was through the lens of his camera as he took his historic picture on May 4, 1970, after the shootings on campus that left four dead and nine wounded.

Filo, then a senior photojournalism major, is now photography director for CBS in New York. Vecchio, then a 14-year-old runaway from Florida, is a respiratory therapist in Florida.

The two were the featured speakers at Monday afternoon’s 39th commemoration of the May 4 shootings. The two-hour program on the Kent State Commons, the site of the student demonstrations, was organized by the May 4th Task Force. It was the culmination of events that began Sunday night with a march and candlelight vigil in the parking lot next to Taylor Hall, where the students were shot by National Guardsmen who fired 87 shots in 13 seconds…

…Filo, using a Nikkormat camera with Tri X film, snapped the image that captivated America when it was published on the cover of the May 18, 1970, edition of Newsweek.

Filo, however, avoided encountering Vecchio for 25 years.

”I thought I had ruined her life,” said Filo, who worked for Sports Illustrated and several newspaper chains before landing a job with CBS in 1995. ”It took me 25 years before I could talk to her.”