Scheuer was born in Youngstown, Ohio, the daughter of Sarah and Martin Scheuer. She had an older sister, Audrey. Her family was Jewish. She was an honors student in speech therapy, 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 riflefrom a distance of 130 yards 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, 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 KentState 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.
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 through the eyes of Tom Grace who was walking with her to her next class. Grace was also wounded by a shot to the ankle. In the chorus: Scheuer is also remembered in Canadian poet Gary Geddes' 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 by Fugazi.
