LOS ANGELES — His beating stunned the nation, left Los Angeles smoldering and helped reshape race relations and police tactics. And in a quavering voice on national television, Rodney King pleaded for peace while the city burned.
LOS ANGELES — His beating stunned the nation, left Los Angeles smoldering and helped reshape race relations and police tactics. And in a quavering voice on national television, Rodney King pleaded for peace while the city burned.
But peace never quite came for King — not after the fires died down, after two of the officers who broke his skull multiple times were punished, after Los Angeles and its flawed police department moved forward. His life, which ended Sunday at age 47 after he was pulled from the bottom of his swimming pool, was a continual struggle even as the city he helped change moved on.
The images — preserved on an infamous grainy video — of the black driver curled up on the ground while four white officers clubbed him more than 50 times with batons — became a national symbol of police brutality in 1991. More than a year later, when the officers’ acquittals touched off one of the most destructive race riots in history, his scarred face and softspoken question — “Can we all get along?” — spurred the nation to confront its difficult racial history.
But while Los Angeles race relations and the city’s police department made strides forward, King kept coming before police and courts, struggling with alcohol addiction and arrests, periodically re-appearing publicly for a stint on “Celebrity Rehab” or a celebrity boxing match. He spent the last months of his life promoting a memoir he titled “The Riot Within: From Rebellion to Redemption.”
King was declared dead at a hospital after his fiance called 911 at 5:25 a.m. to say she found him submerged in the pool at his home in Rialto, about an hour’s drive from Los Angeles. Officers found King in the deep end of the pool, pulled him out and tried unsuccessfully to revive him with CPR.
An autopsy was expected to determine the cause of death within two days; police found no alcohol or drug paraphernalia near the pool and said foul play wasn’t suspected. King’s next-door neighbor, Sandra Gardea, said that around 3 a.m., she heard music and someone “really crying, like really deep emotions. … Like tired or sad, you know?”
“I then heard someone say, ‘OK, Please stop. Go inside the house.’ … We heard quiet for a few minutes then after that we heard a splash in the back.”
King’s death was a grim ending to a saga that began 21 years earlier when he fled from police after he was stopped for speeding. The 25-year-old, on parole from a robbery conviction, had been drinking, which he later said led him to try to evade police. He was finally stopped by four Los Angeles police officers who struck him more than 50 times with their batons, kicked him and shot him with stun guns. He was left with 11 skull fractures, a broken eye socket and facial nerve damage.