10220: Rodney King (1965-2012).

From CNN…

Rodney King dead at 47

By the CNN Wire Staff

Los Angeles (CNN) -- Rodney King, whose beating by Los Angeles police in 1991 was caught on camera and sparked riots after the acquittal of the four officers involved, was found dead in his swimming pool Sunday, authorities and his fiancee said. He was 47.

Police in Rialto, California, received a 911 call from King’s fiancee, Cynthia Kelly, about 5:25 a.m., said Capt. Randy DeAnda. Responding officers found King at the bottom of the pool, removed him and attempted to revive him. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital, DeAnda said.

There were no preliminary signs of foul play, he said, and no obvious injuries on King’s body. Police are conducting a drowning investigation, DeAnda said, and King’s body would be autopsied.

“His fiancee heard him in the rear yard,” he said, and found King in the pool when she went outside.

Kelly was a juror in King’s lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles in 1994.

King’s beating after a high-speed car chase and its aftermath forever changed Los Angeles, its police department and the dialogue on race in America.

King was 25 and on parole after a robbery conviction in April 1991. In an interview in 2011, he recalled he had been drinking and was headed home from a friend’s house when he saw a police car following him and panicked, thinking he would be sent back to prison. So he attempted to flee.

“I had a job to go to that Monday, and I knew I was on parole, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be drinking, and I’m like ‘Oh, my God,’” he told CNN.

He realized he couldn’t outrun the police, but looked for a public place to stop. “I saw all those apartments over there, so I said, ‘I’m gonna stop right there,’” he said. “’If it goes down, somebody will see it.’”

An amateur cameraman caught the scene as four white police officers struck King more than 50 times with their wooden batons and used a stun gun on him.

King said as the officers beat him, they yelled, “We are going to kill you, n***er,” although the officers denied using racial slurs.

The video shows King cowering on the ground and attempting to crawl away as he is surrounded by a crowd of police officers. Four of them used their nightsticks to strike him.

King was beaten nearly to death. Three surgeons operated on him for five hours.

The video of the beating appeared on national television two days later, focusing attention on the issue of racially-motivated police brutality. b “We finally caught the Loch Ness Monster with a camcorder,” King attorney Milton Grimes said.

Four LAPD officers—Theodore Briseno, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind and Sgt. Stacey Koon—were indicted on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force by a police officer.

But following a three-month trial in the predominantly white Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, three of the officers were acquitted of all charges. The jury, which had all white members, deadlocked on one charge of excessive force against Powell, and a mistrial was declared on that charge.

Powell’s attorney, Michael Stone, said earlier this year the unedited video worked against King and helped prove the officers’ case.

“Most of the nation only saw a few snippets where it’s the most violent,” Stone said. “They didn’t see (King) get up and run at Powell.”

But African-Americans in Los Angeles exploded in outrage. Rioters ran through the streets—looting businesses, torching buildings and attacking those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The violence was responsible for more than 50 deaths and $1 billion in property damage.

On the third day of rioting, King emerged from seclusion to make a plea: “People, I just want to say, can we all get along? Can we get along?”

The violence ceased, but the debate did not.

Nearly a year later, the four officers stood trial in federal court on civil rights charges. Two African-Americans were picked for the jury, and King testified. He hedged, however, on whether police used racial slurs during the beating. He told CNN in 2011 that slurs were used, but said he vacillated on the stand because his mother had told him to avoid talking about race.

Koon and Powell were found guilty and sentenced to 30 months in prison. Briseno and Wind were acquitted.

“It was like … I just hope we just get one,” King said. “I hope we just get one on that. If we get one, we’re good. So to get the two, I was really happy.”

King also sued the city of Los Angeles.

“Half of them had no sympathy whatsoever,” Kelly, his fiancee, told CNN earlier this year about her fellow jurors. “… They just didn’t care. Like, ‘He broke the law. He deserved what he got.’ I told them they were crazy. It was about justice for what happened to him. No one deserves to get beat like that.”

The other jurors came around, and King was awarded $3.8 million in damages.

In later years, King had several more run-ins with the law, including a 90-day jail stint in 1996 for a hit-and-run involving his wife at the time. On the 20th anniversary of the beating in 2011, he was pulled over and ticketed for a minor traffic violation.

“The trouble that (people) see me in is a part of my life that I’m working on,” he said in 2011. “I’ll always have an issue when it comes to alcohol. My dad was an alcoholic. The addiction part is in my blood. What I’ve learned to do is arrest my addiction—arrest it myself, so I don’t get arrested.”

In 2008, King appeared on the VH1 reality show “Celebrity Rehab.” He also released a memoir, “The Riot Within,” in which he describes his difficult upbringing and his reflections on the beating and its aftermath.

The ranks of Los Angeles police are much more diverse than they were at the time of King’s beating. Changes have also been made—some compelled by the courts—in the way certain neighborhoods are patrolled and how complaints are handled.

King said earlier this year he has forgiven the officers who beat him.

“Yes, I’ve forgiven them, because I’ve been forgiven many times,” he said. “My country’s been good to me … This country is my house, it’s the only home I know, so I have to be able to forgive—for the future, for the younger generation coming behind me, so … they can understand it and if a situation like that happened again, they could deal with it a lot easier.”

10032: Operating Through Chaos.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Steady hands, determination saved Reginald Denny as L.A. burned

Working on a multiracial team to save a white truck driver who was beaten during the L.A. riots was a defining moment for Madison Richardson, a surgeon and black man who was taught that race shouldn’t matter.

By Martha Groves, Los Angeles Times

Madison Richardson had no clue that Los Angeles was burning.

On April 29, 1992, the head and neck surgeon was touring the Griffith Park Equestrian Center with polo-playing friends from India. A colleague paged him. Could Richardson rush to Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood to help care for a young truck driver who was near death after a beating? Oh, and, by the way, had Richardson been watching TV? No? Then find one and turn it on.

What Richardson saw reminded him instantly of the chaos he witnessed during the Watts riots in 1965 and the Washington, D.C., riots in 1968. Determined to see the situation for himself, he drove his Mercedes south along Crenshaw Boulevard to Florence Avenue before swinging west to Inglewood. As scattered fires burned, Richardson said he didn’t feel threatened. He was black, after all, and it was blacks who were rioting after the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a black man.

“In the run-up to the riots, there was always something in the air every day about the injustice,” he said. “I understood that mentality, the South-Central gestalt.”

His patient was Reginald Denny, whose bashing by four African American assailants was captured live by helicopter news crews. Denny quickly became a symbol of cataclysmic upheaval in Los Angeles, and observers throughout the world wondered whether he would survive.

If Denny were to succumb, Richardson suspected that it would be he — the lone African-American on the surgical team — who would get “scrutinized severely.” Indeed, it was he who was selected to be the team’s public face during nightly press briefings on Denny’s condition.

“There was no way in hell he was going to die on my watch,” Richardson recalled.

The doctor found it awkward to be considering race at all, given that he had spent much of his life insisting that race didn’t, or at least shouldn’t, matter.

A muscular 6-footer, Richardson, 68, was born in Prairie View, Texas. His father was a country doctor who was barred from practicing in local hospitals, so he commuted 60 miles to Huntsville, where he treated black patients by day and white patients at night. He also owned businesses and ranches, where young Madison learned to shoot, ride and “work like a demon.”

Richardson was reared amid an extensive network of white, black and mixed-race relatives. A Texas historical marker near Huntsville commemorates the forbidden love of his great-grandfather, William Rolfe Kelley, and great-grandmother, Dinah Rush. Kelley fought for the Confederacy—then, in defiance of state and federal laws, had 10 children with Rush, a former slave.

“Everybody around me was black and white,” Richardson said. “I didn’t know which part to dislike.”

Richardson attended segregated schools in Texas, but his mother insisted that he never use race as an excuse.

She later married a white, conservative, Republican Texas businessman, and the family moved to Los Angeles. Richardson attended racially and ethnically mixed Los Angeles High School, then historically black Howard University in Washington, where he encountered Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown and other firebrands of the civil rights movement.

“I didn’t go on any freedom rides,” he said. “My mother reminded me I was going to be a doctor.”

Arriving at Daniel Freeman on the day of Denny’s beating, Richardson was part of a “rainbow coalition” of four doctors — two whites, a Korean and himself.

Their patient hovered near death, his skull fractured in 91 places and pushed into his brain. His left eye was so badly dislocated that it was in danger of falling into his sinus cavity. The cheek was shattered — “like you’d dropped an egg on the floor and the shell had broken,” Richardson said.

The team’s first action was to drain the blood that had pooled around Denny’s brain. On the second day, however, neurosurgeon Leslie Geiger called Richardson to say that Denny was in mortal danger. He looked like a “blow-up doll,” with his chest and torso distended, and he was struggling to breathe. Richardson told the hospital to prepare Denny for surgery.

Working with Paul Toffel, a plastic surgeon, and anesthesiologist Yong Chung, Richardson discovered a small puncture in Denny’s windpipe. Air was escaping into Denny’s chest tissue. Richardson performed a tracheotomy, a procedure that routed air to Denny’s lungs.

The delicate task of reconstructing Denny’s facial bones fell to Toffel, with Richardson assisting. Both had been seasoned on military personnel wounded in Vietnam — Toffel in the Navy and Richardson at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Weeks later, Denny went home to recover, but he wasn’t in the clear. When a visiting nurse alerted Richardson that the patient’s legs were tender, Richardson surmised that the discomfort was caused by a blood clot that could dislodge, enter Denny’s lungs and kill him. Richardson sent him to Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale, and Denny’s life was saved again.

The decision was typical of Richardson’s meticulous approach to medicine.

When he was 4, his father died after being given a contaminated anesthetic solution during surgery. “That medical mistake framed my life for a long time,” Richardson said. “I have no tolerance for mistakes.”

Today, 20 years later, Richardson acknowledges that helping to save Denny remains one of the most powerful experiences of his life. He has hoarded mementos from 1992 — surgical notes, clippings, his Polaroid snaps of a bruised, bloody and swollen Denny, a Christmas card signed “Love, Reggie” — all of which he shared recently at his Beverly Hills office. Each triggers fresh memories, about which Richardson speaks with passion and an occasional catch in his voice. He remembers that the stakes were high, for Denny and for his doctors.

“Sometimes in our lives, events converge at a moment in time that seem to clarify and validate all that has preceded that moment,” he said. “All of the intense training, sleepless nights, broken marriages, hardships just seem worth it. I don’t want to consider what would have happened if I had not been prepared when the call came.”

8580: Happy Anniversary, Rodney King Beating.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Twenty years after the beating of Rodney King, the LAPD is a changed operation

In the wake of the videotaped police attack on motorist Rodney King, the department has learned to embrace video scrutiny.

By Joel Rubin, Andrew Blankstein and Scott Gold, Los Angeles Times

It was shortly after midnight, 20 years ago Thursday, when George Holliday awoke to the sounds of police sirens outside his Lake View Terrace apartment. Grabbing his clunky Sony Handycam, he stepped out on his balcony and changed the Los Angeles Police Department forever.

The nine minutes of grainy video footage he captured of Los Angeles police beating Rodney King helped to spur dramatic reforms in a department that many felt operated with impunity. The video played a central role in the criminal trial of four officers, whose not-guilty verdicts in 1992 triggered days of rioting in Los Angeles in which more than 50 people died.

The simple existence of the video was something unusual in itself. Relatively few people then had video cameras, Holliday did — and had the wherewithal to turn it on.

“It was just coincidence,” Holliday reflected in an interview a decade ago. “Or luck.”

Today, things are far different and the tape that so tainted the LAPD has a clear legacy in how officers think about their jobs. Police now work in a YouTube world in which cellphones double as cameras, news helicopters transmit close-up footage of unfolding police pursuits, and surveillance cameras capture arrests or shootings. Police officials are increasingly recording their officers. Compared to the cops who beat King, officers these days hit the streets with a new reality ingrained in their minds: Someone is always watching.

“Early on in their training, I always tell them, ‘I don’t care if you’re in a bathroom taking care of your personal business…. Whatever you do, assume it will be caught on video,’” said Sgt. Heather Fungaroli, who supervises recruits at the LAPD’s academy. “We tell them if they’re doing the right thing then they have no reason to worry.”

The ubiquitous use of cameras by the public has helped serve as a deterrent to police abuse, said Geoff Alpert, a leading expert on police misconduct.

“At the time of King it was just fortuitous that someone had a camera,” Alpert said. “Things are a whole lot more transparent now and if you’re going to do something stupid, then you’re going to pay for your stupidity.”

Although some officers remain uncomfortable about people filming them, the culture shift has been particularly profound among younger officers who grew up in a world of mobile video and picture-sharing.

“We grew up with reality TV and smart phones. Everybody’s life was on camera,” said Joseph Stevens, a 26-year-old officer in the LAPD’s West Bureau. “It’s a given that everything I do could end up on television or YouTube. With the older era, they’re still surprised at some of the technology…. They have questions about it but are starting to adapt.”

Read the full story here.

7951: “Can We All Get Married?”

From The New York Post…

Rodney King to marry juror from his 1991 police brutality trial

Rodney King, the victim of a 1991 beating by Los Angeles police, is set to marry one of the jurors from his controversial civil trial, RadarOnline reported Tuesday.

King, 44, recently proposed to Cynthia Kelley—juror number five—who pushed to award King a $3.8 million payout in a civil case against the city of Los Angeles. “She is a godsend, a blessing in my life,” King told the entertainment website. “I don’t know what I would have done without her in my life … I can’t wait to make her my wife.”

Nineteen years ago, King was chased by police through the San Fernando Valley and was captured on videotape being beaten by four white officers. Their acquittal at a criminal trial sparked the notorious race riots that lasted for four days, leaving 55 dead and more than 2,000 injured.

At the time of the trial both Kelley and King were married but they both later divorced. “Our first date was the next day after the trial when Rodney’s lawyer and Rodney met me in a local pizzeria in Newport Beach,” said Kelley.

The pair separated during King’s stay on VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” and did not reunite until four months ago, when King telephoned to ask if his former love was still single. “We hadn’t spoken to each other for many years, and it just so happened that we reconnected. It was like we were never apart from one another,” Kelley said.

Kelley—who was the only black juror in the case—said, “During deliberations, the other jurors said, ‘Let’s just award him $100,000, you know he’s just gonna blow it anyway.’ It was a blessing that I was even there, the other jurors didn’t want to give him anything.”

King, famous for asking, “Can’t we all just get along?,” told the website the couple is yet to set a date for their nuptials.

7097: Another Rodney King Beating.

From The New York Post…

This time, King does the hitting

By Annie Karni

It’s been 18 years since African-American Rodney King was brutally beaten by white LAPD cops, whose acquittal in the incident sparked race riots in Los Angeles.

But King, 44, famous for asking, “Can’t we all just get along?” got his vengeance Friday in the boxing ring.

King was the unanimous winner in a three-round celebrity boxing match against retired Police Officer Simon Aouad, 31, outside Philadelphia.

“We had offers from everyone—Joey Buttafuoco to John Wayne Bobbitt—wanting to fight Rodney King,” said fight promoter Damon Feldman. “We received over 5,000 e-mails after we announced the fight. Simon was a police officer for two years, that’s why we picked him.”

King was paid $5,000 to fight in the bout at the Philadelphia Airport Ramada Inn, said Feldman. The match drew a crowd of about 500 boxing fans.

To prep for his big win, King trained in his hometown of Los Angeles by sparring, hitting the bags and jumping rope, said Feldman.

King’s next foray in the squared circle is scheduled for November, and will take place in Los Angeles against former Oakland A’s outfielder Jose Canseco.

The former LAPD punching bag was awarded $3.8 million in a civil case against the city of Los Angeles, and used part of the money to start a hip-hop music label.

Essay 4777

Taking shots with a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• Rodney King was struck in the face and arm with shotgun pellets in San Bernadino on Wednesday, although his injuries are reportedly not life threatening. Guess we can’t all get along. No word if Vice President Dick Cheney is involved.

• An Arkansas lawmaker apologized for sending an email that stated, “we are being outpopulated by the blacks” and “we are being overrun” by undocumented immigrants. However, he insisted the message was not racist. Perhaps the official should seek counsel from Dog the Bounty Hunter.

• Fred Goldman is back in court, this time to fight a Swedish web site offering free downloads of O.J. Simpson’s “If I Did It” book. Goldman, who owns the rights to the book, demanded that the pirate site stop posting the book. But in the lawsuit, the site operators stated, “they are not subject to the laws of the United States.” They appear to be taking an O.J. Simpson defense, as the man acts like he’s not subject to the laws of the United States too.