20 years ago: Rodney King verdict sparked L.A. riots

The beating on March 3, 1991; the acquittals on April 29, 1992; and the ensuing riots – all eyes were on Southern California during the 20th century's worst domestic disturbance. Check out our slideshow for a recap of the spring of 1992.
The beating seen round the world occurred March 3, 1991, in the Lake View Terrace section of Los Angeles. After a chase, police pulled over Rodney King. The video George Holliday shot from his balcony was broadcast over and over in the ensuing days. Four of the officers were charged with assault.
The four officers charged with assault in King's videotaped beating were, clockwise from upper left: Laurence Powell, who hit King the most. Five months after the beating, he maintained, "I didn't do anything wrong." Stacy Koon, who was convicted along with Powell in a subsequent federal trial. Timothy Briseno, who said of the beating in court, "I just thought the whole thing was out of control." Timothy Wind, who can be seen in the videotape smashing King in the legs.
Laurence Powell, center, and Timothy Wind hug shortly after the verdicts were read in their assault trial. Stacy Koon, back right, looks on. Only one count in the trial did not end in acquittal. The jury could not agree on that count, against Koon. The acquittals come at 3:15 p.m. April 29.
This confrontation outside L.A. police headquarters at Parker Center occurred about 6:30 p.m., after several hundred demonstrators had gathered in response to the acquittals.
A rookie police officer who witnessed King's beating testified in the assault trial that he saw Laurence Powell hit King on the shoulders and the face with his baton. Rolando Solano said he was standing three feet away when he saw Powell's baton strike King. Solano's partner was Timothy Briseno, one of the four officers charged. After the acquittals, rioting broke out in south Los Angeles; here, L.A. police officers hold the line outside one of many buildings in the city that were potential targets of looters. At the start of the rioting, at Florence and Normandie avenues in south-central Los Angeles, two dozen officers confronting the crowd are outnumbered, and they leave.
A Korean shopping mall at Third Street and Vermont Avenue burns April 30, 1992, the second day of rioting. L.A.'s Koreatown was hard-hit by the rioting; about 2,500 Korean businesses were destroyed in the tumult after the verdicts.
After police left the Florence-Normandie intersection, the rioters took out their frustration on motorists. Truck driver Reginald Denny's beating at about 6:45 p.m. is probably the best known because it was caught on TV by an overhead helicopter crew. Denny, en route to deliver sand to a cement plant, was pulled from his rig, kicked and beaten. One of Denny's attackers, Damian Williams, bashed the trucker's skull with a concrete block. Denny survived because four south-central residents came to his rescue: The four put him in his truck and drove him to a nearby hospital. According to Time magazine, Denny now lives in Lake Havasu, Ariz., and avoids the media.
On March 6, 1991, Rodney King shows bruises alleged to have been sustained at the hands of Powell, Koon, Briseno and Wind three days earlier. At the time, King was on probation for a robbery offense. When California Highway Patrol officers saw him speeding and gave chase, King drove faster. The ensuing chase ended in Lake View Terrace with the beating filmed by George Holilday, who lived nearby.
Smoke billows from fires in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles on April 29, 1992. Columns of smoke such as this were all too common April 29 and 30 as fires continued to be set. We were driving along Katella Avenue in Los Alamitos the evening of May 2, heading toward our old Long Beach neighborhood, when we saw a huge column of smoke to the southwest. Thinking we were far from any danger, we continued driving. We should have reconsidered ...
This furniture store on Long Beach Boulevard burned May 1; a day later, we drove by and saw it lying in ruins (nothing but wood, ashes, smoke and fizzle left). As we drove south on Long Beach Boulevard, we realized the tower of smoke we'd seen was coming not from south-central L.A. but from a mostly abandoned former office building near downtown Long Beach. No one was rioting that Saturday evening, but plenty of unhappy, mean-looking people were crossing back and forth across the street. Deciding our plans to eat in Belmont Shore were among the worst conceivable, we high-tailed it back to Orange County along Seventh Street. Every intersection held a law-enforcement officer -- national guard, police, sheriff's department -- and each of those had a rifle or other weapon at the ready.
The disturbance (that seems a bit of a quaint term for the worst domestic violence in the 20th century, doesn't it?) lasted three days, and fires continued to burn. This one, which occurred April 30 at the corner of 67th Street and West Boulevard in south-central Los Angeles, is one of hundreds of businesses that were destroyed in the uproar.
A car-parts store burns at the corner of Adams and Dunsmuire, just south of the I-10. Thousands of businesses were set ablaze during the three days of rioting, with property damage set at $1 billion.
No one was hitting the beach on May 2, 1992; county officials closed an eight-mile stretch of beach in Venice and Playa del Rey in the wake of the rioting, which didn't just occur in south-central, although that was the flashpoint. Rioting broke out in Inglewood between 7 and 9 p.m. April 29. Long Beach declared a state of emergency about 6:30 p.m. April 30. Curfews also were imposed in Carson, Culver City, Hawthorne, Hermosa Beach, Huntington Park, Inglewood, Pomona, San Fernando, Torrance and West Hollywood. For a detailed look at the events from April 29 to May 4 compiled by the Los Angeles Fire Department, click here.
Smoke covers much of Los Angeles on April 30 as fires continue to burn without letup. According to the Los Angeles Fire Department, the toll from 3 p.m. April 29, when things started getting out of hand, through 11 p.m. April 30 stood at 25 dead, 572 injured, 1,000 fires set, 720 people arrested, and an estimated $200 million to $250 million in damage. Those figures would all grow in the following days.

April 11, 2012 at 9:41 p.m.

April 1992. A still, warm day in Southern California.

In a Simi Valley courtroom, four Los Angeles police officers await the verdicts that will decide their futures. And much of the country waits, too, watching on TV.

Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseno and Timothy Wind – all white – are accused of beating Rodney King – a black man – after a high-speed chase.

The March 3, 1991, beating is caught on video. The video, shot by George Holliday, is broadcast throughout the nation, the world.

The jury returns. And so it begins.

Not guilty.

Standing in the very newsroom where we are typing these words, we watched, along with dozens of others, in stunned silence as the verdicts were announced.

We turned to the person next to us.

“There’s going to be a riot,” we say.

We don’t know what made us say that. We aren’t prescient. But we did live through the 1960s, when riots broke out all over the country, including our home state of New Jersey. We remember the flames, the fear that, although Newark was miles away, the chaos could somehow touch us.

On that warm Southern California day, we were right.

Was King to blame? Were the cops? Hindsight has blamed nearly everyone involved, including King, who was drunk, and speeding away from the officers chasing him; former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, who was out of a job shortly after the riots; the LAPD itself, for its perceived macho attitude; the media, for overplaying an edited tape of the beating that did not include the beginning, where King could be seen charging the officers; the city government … and of course the people who reacted with rage and tore through south-central Los Angeles and other areas, looting, robbing, beating and setting fires.

The riots broke out at Normandie and Florence on April 29. When things settled three days later, more than 50 people were dead, more than 1,000 buildings had been destroyed, and a city looked at itself with new eyes that were anything but proud.

Click through the slides to see the story of Rodney King and the riots of 1992, the worst civil disturbance of the 20th century.