King Tells of Beating, Racial Taunts by Police : Prosecution: Glimpse of likely testimony provided.

He felt hard black boots ramming his head and nightsticks crashing on his legs. He felt electricity surge through his writhing body. And Rodney G. King, surrounded by Los Angeles police officers, said he heard the voices of “punks” and “wimps.”

“I remember a whole bunch of name-calling,” King told the district attorney’s office in a confidential interview about the events of last March 3. “They said, ‘Lay down, nigger.’ They said, ‘How do you feel now, nigger?’ They said, ‘What are you going to do now, killer?’ They said, ‘Shut up, nigger.’ ”

King said that the officer who beat him most savagely had the specter of “death in his eyes,” while two dozen others stood by smiling as though enjoying themselves at a neighborhood “block party.” Through it all, while lying in his own blood, King said, he wondered whether the next blow would be the last.

King’s recollections came during a 90-minute interview with two district attorney investigators July 9--four months after the incident that triggered a political uproar in Los Angeles and a national debate on police abuse. A tape recording of the interview, held in the Beverly Hills office of King’s lawyers, was recently made available to The Times.

His statements provide, for the first time, a look at what King is likely to say during his pivotal testimony in the trial next month of four Los Angeles policemen charged in the beating. Some observers expect him to be on the stand for up to two weeks as defense attorneys try to impeach his testimony and undermine his credibility by portraying him as a drunk ex-convict who provoked the officers.

To date, King’s only public statements about his violent, videotaped encounter with Los Angeles police were made just days after the beating during a brief news conference following his release from the Men’s Central Jail. Seated in a wheelchair, his face bruised and swollen, King revealed few details except to say that he had not resisted the officers and that he took the beating “like a man.”

On that same day, his family said they did not believe the assault was racially motivated. And King, two days after the beating, told police investigators that “I know it wasn’t a racial thing. . . . I don’t know what I did to be beat up.”

But in his interview with the district attorney’s office, King said he was subjected to racial slurs from the outset by men without the courage to fight fairly. “Little punk voices is what it sounded like to me,” he said, describing the insults. “It was childish words from big, grown boys.”

The district attorney’s chief prosecutor on the case, Terry White, refused Wednesday to discuss King’s taped interview. But two of the accused officers’ attorneys sharply challenged King’s assertions that he was subjected to racial insults.

“It’s ridiculous that he would say that,” said Darryl Mounger, who is representing Sgt. Stacey C. Koon, the ranking supervisor at the scene. “Nobody else has said that. That is totally ridiculous.”

John Barnett, the attorney for Officer Theodore J. Briseno, pointed to the earlier statements of King’s lawyer that the beating was not racially motivated. “His prior recollections,” Barnett said, “seem to impeach his later revelations.”

The lawyers for officers Laurence M. Powell and Timothy E. Wind could not be reached Wednesday.

King’s lawyer, Steven Lerman, said Wednesday that King had not revealed the racist jeers earlier because he feared police “might come and kill him or there might be a race war out there.”

“The unspeakable horror that was visited on him that night,” Lerman said, “gave him an incredible amount fear and paranoia.”

Pulled Over by Police

During his district attorney interview, which was delayed while the 26-year-old black man recuperated from his injuries, King was asked to explain what happened when he pulled his white Hyundai to a stop near the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street in the Lake View Terrace section of the San Fernando Valley.

The first thing he said he heard was the voice of a female California Highway Patrol officer who had begun pursuing King for speeding on Interstate 210.

“I could hear a woman’s voice saying, ‘Put your hands up where we can see them,’ ” he said. King said he used his left hand to open the car door, as he was ordered to do, and stepped out. “She said, ‘Take three steps back and lay down,’ so I took three steps back. She said, ‘Spread your arms and legs apart.’ ”

Next came shouts from a Los Angeles police sergeant, whose rank King said he could identify because of the stripes on his sleeves. The only sergeant present was Koon, one of the four officers awaiting trial on Feb. 3 in Ventura County.

“Spread your legs apart!” King quoted the sergeant as saying. “ ‘Spread your legs apart and lay down!’ He said, ‘I mean it! I mean it!’ ”

“I didn’t know why they were so mad,” King said. “I thought, they want to blow my f------ brains out, man.”

He said he reluctantly lay down on the ground, his head not far from the front of his car. Within moments, he said, he was surrounded by officers.

“They walked over to me and I felt a blow to the head,” he said. “He (one of the officers) walked over to me and, boom, he kicked me in the face. And then I heard . . . ‘We’re going to kill you, nigger! Run!’

“I thought, s---, something ain’t right.”

Describing the first blow, King said, “It was a real hard kick from the boot. It was enough to make me feel my jawbone move. My face got rearranged.”

A second blow, he said, struck him in the head. “I thought I had stopped somewhere in the Middle East, man. . . . I went numb completely. . . . It felt like a big boulder hit me. I didn’t know what the hell hit me . . .

“My face was in a daze. Everything was blurry. All the while, these punks are up over my head and I’m on the ground.”

He said one officer walked over to him and said, “Damn!” The officer then raised his foot, according to King, and “boom! He kicked me. I got real cold for a second and then, I think, I went out. There was blood and when he kicked me I was already numb and I didn’t really feel it.”

King said he then came under a fusillade of blows and kicks. “I was struck all over,” he said. “In my back. All in my arms. My legs. Every bone in my body was hit that night. I laid down. I kept telling myself it would be over soon.”

‘Then I Went Numb’

But the blows and kicks continued, and King said he didn’t know when or if they would stop. “I was beat on so bad my brain stopped,” he said. “It wasn’t working.”

He said he remembers being shot twice with a Taser, a weapon that shoots electrical darts attached to a thin wire.

“Boom and bang, and I felt a little string going in my body,” he said. “I could see a little string hanging from whatever went in me and then I heard ZZZZZZZ! At first, I was feeling real cold.

“Then I felt it in my back and it wouldn’t stop. I could feel the string around my (right) arm. It was a weird feeling, man. I couldn’t pull the damn thing out. I couldn’t move it. My brain was working but my body wasn’t. I couldn’t move my body. My brain was telling me things but I just couldn’t move my body.

“I swear I tried to tell myself, ‘No pain. No pain. No pain. No pain.’ I said, ‘No pain.’

“Then I went numb. . . . And what made it worse was that I was laying in my own blood. The electricity was zapping me while I was laying in water. It’s worse when you’re wet. I was soaked in my own blood. I was bleeding all over. Out of my mouth, my nose, my chest, my legs. And it was bleeding inside my body.”

King said he decided to get off the ground and run because he feared for his life. He managed to stand up, he said, but only briefly.

“I had no intention on running until the blow to the head and they said, ‘We’re going to kill you! Run!’ ” King said.

“I looked around for a safe place to run, to get out of there, but they were all around me,” he said. “There was nothing I could do. When I stood up . . . I got struck--boom!--in the face. Something fast and hard right across the top of the head.

“I was too weak then, with that blow there I was really out. Everything after that was really nerves, my nerves holding me together.”

King, describing himself as dazed, said he was then handcuffed and hogtied. He said he never saw the officers look in his car to see if he had hidden a weapon and could not understand why they seemed to enjoy beating a defenseless man. “They were a bunch of wimps, man,” he said.

King said he most recalled the actions of Officer Powell, who is seen on the videotape leveling the fiercest and most numerous blows.

King said that while riding to the hospital in the back of a patrol car with Powell at his side, he begged the officer to let him go, saying he would walk home and tell no one of the beating.

“I said, ‘Please let me go, man. I won’t say nothing, just let me go. I won’t say nothing,’ ” King said. But Powell, he said, remained quiet.

“He didn’t say nothing to me. But I could see death in his eyes. And he looked at me like, ‘Motherf-----, we should have killed you.’ ”

He also was critical of Sgt. Koon, the supervising officer who King said he hoped would order an end to the assault.

“When I seen the stripes on the guy’s arm,” King said, “I thought everything was going to be under control, and that’s when they walked over and . . . hit me in the face.”

King also said he was shocked that two dozen officers stood by and allowed the beating to continue without intervening.

“I watched the rest of them sitting around,” he said. “It looked like a f------ block party to me. They were all around me and I’m wondering, ‘Damn, I hope somebody stops them. Why doesn’t somebody stop them?’ And they all had smiles on their faces.”

Memory of Trauma

King told the district attorney’s investigators that, while his memory of that night fades in and out, he will never forget the physical and mental trauma. “My memory’s coming back to me,” he said at one point. “My brain’s coming back.”

“I felt so defenseless and useless,” he said. “I didn’t do nothing wrong. That’s what I was thinking when I was laying there in the ditch. Thinking, who’s going to believe you? Who’s going to believe you?”

In all, King said, he thought he was struck “about 10 good times.” But the videotape of the beating, shot by an amateur photographer from a nearby apartment building, shows that King was pummeled dozens of times. And while King estimated that the beating lasted approximately 40 seconds, the tape shows that it was actually twice that long.

King also said in the interview that “four or five” officers hit him with batons and five kicked him. The videotape, however, shows only two officers striking him with batons and two using their feet.

According to his attorney, King suffered almost a dozen fractures in his head and in the bones around his eyes. Also, his leg was broken, some of his teeth were knocked out and he was severely bruised on his chest, arm and ankles. He underwent a series of operations for his injuries, including surgery to remove gravel that was embedded in his face when officers dragged him along the ground.

The extent of King’s injuries was not included in police reports filed immediately after the incident.

Unaware that they were being videotaped, officers wrote that King resisted arrest and attacked them. They described his injuries as only “contusions and abrasions.”

In addition, Koon, in a separate sergeant’s log, said King’s injuries were “of a minor nature,” such as a split inner lip and several facial cuts.