Less than two hours later, Los Angeles was in flames. Some people reacted with disbelief to the jury verdicts; others reacted in anger. A crowd outside the Ventura County Courthouse shouted "Guilty! According to Rodney King's bodyguard, Tom Owens, King sat "absolutely motionless" as he watched in "pure disbelief" the televised verdicts being read.
A visibly angry Mayor Tom Bradley publicly declared, "Today, the jury told the world that what we all saw with our own eyes was not a crime. The youths each grabbed bottles of malt liquor and headed out the door, where they were blocked by the son of the store's owner, David Lee.
One young man smashed Lee on the head with a bottle, while two others shattered the storefront with their thrown bottles. One of the youths shouted, "This is for Rodney King!
Events grew increasingly ugly. Black youths with baseball bats battered a car driven by a white. Another white driver was hit in the face by a chunk of concrete thrown threw his car windshield. Police faced gangs of rock and bottle-throwing youths.
The taunting, missile-hurling crowds grew in size, forcing the police to beat a hasty retreat out of the riot area. The Florence-Neighborhood is left to the anarchy of the mob attacking helpless civilians. Perhaps the most horrific image of the riots involved mild-mannered truck driver Reginald Denny. Denny was at the wheel of his eighteen-wheeler, carrying a load of sand and listening to country music, when at P.
A helicopter overhead captured on videotape what occurred next. Denny was pulled from his truck into the street, where he was kicked and then beaten on the head with a claw hammer. The most vicious attack came from Damian Williams who smashed a block of concrete on Denny's head at point-blank range, knocking him unconscious and fracturing his head in ninety-one places.
The helicopter camera recorded Williams doing a victory dance as he gleefully pointed out Denny's bloodied figure. When the rioting finally ended five days later, fifty-four people mostly Koreans and Latinos were dead--the greatest death toll in any American civil disturbance since the Draft Riots in New York City. Hundreds of people including sixty firefighters were injured. Looting and fires had resulted in more than one billion dollars in property damage.
Whole neighborhoods in south central Los Angeles, such as Koreatown, looked like war zones. Over 7, persons were arrested. On the day after the Simi Valley verdict, Bush issued a statement declaring that the verdict "has left us all with a deep sense of personal frustration and anguish.
Prosecuting the officers on the federal charge of violating King's civil rights accomplished two Bush Administration goals. The first goal was to control the rage that had developed in black communities. The second was to reduce demands from some in the civil rights community for sweeping investigations into police misconduct. On May 7, federal prosecutors began presenting evidence to a Los Angeles grand jury. On August 4, the grand jury returned indictments against the three officers for "willfully and intentionally using unreasonable force" and against Koon for "willfully permitting and failing to take action to stop the unlawful assault.
The Department of Justice assembled a formidable team of four prosecutors to try the closely watched case. Lead prosecutor on the team was thirty-four-year old Steven Clymer , considered the best trial lawyer in the U.
Attorney's office in Los Angeles. Unlike the Simi Valley jury, the federal jury was racially mixed. Although the defense made a considerable effort to exclude African-Americans, two blacks were seated as jurors.
One of the two, Marian Escobel "Juror No. In one of his most important trial rulings, Judge Davies denied a defense motion to remove Escobel from the jury--perhaps because he understood that the juror accurately perceived the defense conduct. A second problem for the defense resulted from their focus on excluding African-American jurors: they gave insufficient attention to identifying and excluding white jurors who were especially fearful of producing a verdict that would cause more rioting.
In addition to a more favorable jury, the prosecution had other advantages in the second trial. Clymer noted later that the government "had the advantage of seeing everything that had gone wrong in the first trial. He avoided juror suspicion that the prosecution was hiding something by calling Rodney King to the stand. He came up with a medical expert who would prove King's facial injury came from a baton blow, not the asphalt. He identified a credible use-of-force expert, Mark Conta, who countered the testimony of the defense's expert.
He used cross-examination to suggest that defense police witnesses were friends seeking to bail the defendants out of a tight spot. Finally, he presented new and potentially damaging facts to present to the jury, such as Powell taking King on a ninety-minute detour to Foothill Station after leaving Pacifica Hospital, rather than directly to the USC Medical Center, as Koon had requested.
Clymer hoped that the jury might conclude the detour was made to show off their injured "trophy. King may have been an ex-con who had given wildly different accounts of his beating, but he came across on the stand as an uneducated man was either too drunk or confused to remember events, not as a sophisticated liar.
Through King's testimony, the jurors saw a man who seemed to have been in genuine fear of his life. He also raised the issue of race. Although he at first had denied that race had anything to do with his beating, he told the jury that as he was being hit, the officers "were chanting either 'What's up killer?
How do you feel killer? He saw King as "very polite and mild-mannered and thoughtful" and that, he said, "spells credibility. Changes in the defense strategy also worked to the prosecution's advantage. Koon, in his testimony, revealed none of the inner fears that seemed to impress the Simi Valley jury.
To some jurors in the federal trial, he came across as arrogant or cocky. Powell, afraid of Clymer's expected rough cross-examination chose not to take the stand at all. Theodore Briseno appeared as a witness only on videotape.
Judge Davies granted the prosecution's request to show the videotape as rebuttal evidence after Briseno's new attorney, Harland Braun, announced that Briseno would not testify. Braun's decision was based on his proposed a "unified defense" in which the defendants would strive to keep their differences to a minimum.
As he studied the case, Braun came to see Powell as a "scared kid" and Koon as taking more responsibility for the beating than was due. Braun believed all four officers deserved acquittal, and saw few benefits--and much potential harm--to his client in putting Briseno on the stand where he would be cross-examined about his criticisms of his fellow officers.
The effect, however, of Briseno appearing only on videotape was to magnify problems for Koon and Powell. He said he had purchased the camera about a month earlier and he grabbed it instinctively when he was awakened by noise outside his window. Holliday said in that he was working on a documentary about his role in the King case, but it was unclear if anything became of that project.
Search Search. Home United States U. Africa 54 - November 12, VOA Africa Listen live. VOA Newscasts Latest program. In , he was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence, and in , police found him drunk with non-life threatening gunshot wounds also believed to be the result of a domestic dispute.
Upon the 20th anniversary of the L. My country's been good to me, and I've done some things that wasn't pleasant in my lifetime, and I've been forgiven for that. In a final tragic twist, Rodney King's life ended on June 17, His fiancee, Cynthia Kelley, found him at the bottom of a swimming pool in Rialto, California.
Kelley had previously served as a juror in King's civil law suit against the City of Los Angeles. According to police who responded to the scene, there were no preliminary signs of foul play. King was pronounced dead at a local hospital, 20 years after the L. Upon the 25th anniversary of the L. Riots, a slew of documentaries were released in the spring of Among them were L. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!
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Martin Luther King Jr. Memories of the King video resurfaced following the death of George Floyd, an African-American who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes, a killing that a bystander captured on video, sparking months of protests against police brutality and racism across the world.
On March 3, , Holliday stood on his balcony and used his Sony Video8 Handycam to record the police officers beating King. Holliday called the police to find out what had happened. When they declined to share information with him, he rang the KTLA news station.
King - who was on parole for robbery - had led police on a high-speed chase through Los Angeles.
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