A Long Night of Anger, Anarchy : Riots: Some good Samaritans brave violent mobs and jittery police to aid the injured.

Carlos Mejia was one of the lucky ones. He had a large bandage taped to his head and dried blood smudged on his face, but he was leaving the hospital alive.

Mejia was driving near Manchester Boulevard and Western Avenue on his way to pick up his cousin at work when a mob converged on his car Wednesday night.

“Five came from one side, and five came from the other,” he said outside the hospital, still dazed hours later. “They asked me if I was white and then they started throwing bricks at the car.”

One of the bricks came crashing through the windshield, striking Mejia, 18, in the head. Gushing blood nearly blinded him but he kept driving, not knowing what else to do.

“I thought if I stopped, they would kill me,” he gasped.

For Los Angeles, it was only the beginning. The worst outbreak of violence in 27 years was to follow, a seemingly capricious demonstration of anger, frustration, folly and anarchy consuming neighborhoods from South Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley.

The rioters, looters and marauders left a horrific trail of human suffering, destroying lifelong dreams and instilling a paralyzing fear in a city that some thought had grown numb to random violence.

“It reminds me of the Watts riots, but here you got it in the west, you got it in the north, you got it in the east,” said Norma King, a retired nurse from South Los Angeles, out late Wednesday night. “I’m upset with the verdict, but this is incredible,” said King, whose brother was wounded by police during the street violence of 1965.

The rebellion, which entered its second day, painted a murky, surrealistic picture of Los Angeles--one not always easy to grasp, but one with real victims, heroes and villains.

Two black men, one old, one young, stood near the intersection of Figueroa and Vernon and watched businesses burn before dawn Thursday. In the glow of the flames, they echoed the complex emotions of the night--emotions that, depending on whom you talked to, which corner you stood on, ranged from simmering outrage to hopeless resignation.

“I don’t know where to turn, what I can do,” Al Ray, 57, said of a system that acquitted three white police officers accused of beating a black man and a fourth officer on all but one count. “All I do is try to stay out of trouble.”

But that didn’t make sense to L. Griffith, 29. He didn’t take part in the violence--he even tried to put out the fires blazing through businesses near his home--but he understood the rage that ignited them.

“Sir, how would you feel if you were driving home and they pulled you over for nothing? . . . That happens to me all the time.”

The older man looked at the younger. “That done happened to me,” the older one said. “That done happened to me several times. I’ve gotten to the point, I don’t go out that much at night anymore. And that’s one of the reasons.”

But he said, “I just don’t feel there’s anything I can do about it.”

He seemed almost paralyzed by his pain. “I’m past anger,” Ray said. “I’m hurt and I’m angry. I don’t know which one outweighs the other.”

Near the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues, J.T. felt helpless as looters picked his South-Central neighborhood clean.

“Stop it! Stop it!” he yelled. “You’re all ruining my block!”

J.T., 18 years old and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, watched as the mob grazed on a liquor store, an auto body shop and then the corner gas station.

“Look at that fool,” he muttered, pointing at a man setting a small pickup truck on fire. Then it was just too much. J.T. took off for home, grabbed some water and drenched the flames.

“These fools are just going to burn it again,” he said, defeated. He was right. Half an hour later, a pack of youths circled the unattended truck, setting it afire.

An hour later, Eugene stood defiantly at the same corner, rocks flying across the street. He acknowledged taking a few beers from the liquor store, even trying to break into the gas station safe earlier that night. He wasn’t afraid--not even after invading rival gang turf.

The everyday rules of gang warfare had been summarily suspended. Crips and Bloods had joined ranks, all in the name of ransacking the community.

“Ain’t no reason to be afraid,” 21-year-old Eugene scoffed. “Everybody’s together. I see Hoovers and 8 Trey Gangsters, even Bloods. There’s nothing to be afraid of when everybody’s together. There ain’t anybody scared of nothin’ out here.”

As police approached the devastated intersection, Eugene stood his ground. “We ain’t afraid of them,” he blasted. “We got guns just like them.”

When the police stopped, they met outright hostility.

“Go on, harass me!” another young black man taunted a group of officers. “You know that verdict wasn’t right. . . . Smiling, are you? Are you going to beat me like Rodney King? . . . Come on. Just try it.”

Just then, several more police cars screeched to the intersection and the young man and his friends suddenly were gone.

“Where you running?” one officer jeered.

It was late when the elderly black couple pulled up to the 77th Street police station in a white Cadillac. Slumped in the back seat was a Latino man with a gunshot wound in the head.

The man needed help. He desperately needed help.

Any other day, these Good Samaritans would have been hailed as heroes. Not tonight. Los Angeles was at war with itself. The city was ablaze. No one felt safe and it was impossible to know friend from foe.

“Stop there . . . or I’ll kill you!” shouted an officer posted outside the station as he pulled a revolver on the couple.

The Cadillac screeched to a halt. Moments passed. The man and woman sat motionless, not knowing what to do. Only when the jittery officer realized who was inside did the tension subside.

On Vermont Avenue near Jefferson Boulevard, the president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP stood Thursday and cried as she watched a neighborhood market burn.

The tears, Sandra Evers-Manley said, were for her community. “We’ve got a crisis in our city and right now there seems not to be a solution. There’s a lot of frustration.”

“I understand it,” she said. “I’ve been in the middle of it. We’ve gotten hate letters over the last four weeks, saying Rodney King got what he deserved. We’ve got people calling up saying what do I tell my children?”

On Wednesday night, she noticed something odd. “Normally, when I come home, in our community, police are very visible. There’s not a night that goes by normally without hearing a helicopter. Tonight, the police were not visible. . . .”

Evers-Manley walked off to check on an elderly neighbor, and 69-year-old Earle Renaux walked up. People call him “Godfather.” He stood, wearing a Carolina Gamecocks hat, eating peanut M&Ms;, and watched the Sorbonne market burn.

“I’m taking my kids out of the area,” said Renaux, the father of two teen-age sons. “Next school year, they’ll be gone. We’re going up north out of Los Angeles.”

Why?

Because when he walks to the bus stop each night to meet his wife, police harass him. “They ask me for I.D. I say, we’re not in South Africa.”

As for the Sorbonne market, he didn’t like it too much. You paid too much for too little. They never hired blacks, he said. So, he’d just go there to buy his Scotch and cigarettes. Still, burning it down was not the way.

Just before the sunset curfew Thursday, hundreds of looters swept along 3rd and Bonnie Brae streets, raiding a Tianguis market and fleeing with armloads of stolen groceries.

For some, it got messy, even dangerous. Several lost their footing on floors slick with toppled flour and crushed tomatoes, and they spilled their booty.

But the hazards were only a temporary setback.

“Free food! Free food in there!” was the shout as they fled toward cars or slipped around corners on foot. Scores of onlookers could not resist the offer.

One teen-age reveler said he drove all the way from Santa Monica for a piece of the action. “I don’t even believe it myself,” he said. “I never thought something like this would happen.”

Not far away, weaving through crowds along Vermont Avenue, a boy named Juan saw a small plastic bag outside a Music Plus record store. Without breaking his stride, the 14-year-old snatched the bag, tore it open and examined the treasure: two “Robin Hood” videocassettes and a Walkman headset.

“People are running, dropping everything,” he said. “I feel like this is a dream or something.”

Across the street, a dozen police officers assembled in the parking lot at a Ralphs supermarket, donning helmets and carrying batons.

“What do you think the police is going to do?” Juan said, unimpressed. “The police are stupid, man.”

Crouched silently on steps near the Union Rescue Mission on South Main Street, Harry Redmond was one of several hundred homeless people stuck outside late Thursday night when a citywide curfew was supposed to clear the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

There was nowhere else for him to go.

Dressed in black jeans, sweat shirt and Reebocks and carefully protecting his few belongings--including a comb and small panhandler’s cup--Redmond said few police officers had ventured into the gritty streets of downtown’s Skid Row.

The mood among the city’s homeless, he said, was utter elation. The have-nots were having their day of glory. Looting.

“You get a little money in your pocket and a radio,” the bearded occasional cook said. “Everybody’s happy. It is Rodney King Day.”

Redmond, who has lived on the streets since the beginning of the year, knew well enough, though, not to expect it to last.

“It will cool down in a day or two because they have been up for a few days,” he said of the rioters. “When it is all over, a lot of people are going to suffer. Like today, you couldn’t even buy a soda because all of the stores are closed.”

Not far away, on the other side of the mission, another of Skid Row’s outcasts was philosophical about the mayhem.

“It is all well deserved,” said Johnny. “There is not justice in America, homey.”

A gray van pulled up to the emergency entrance of Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood. Several people--frantic, panicked--climbed out, begging for help. A man had been run over at Florence and Western avenues. They had him inside the van.

“All these cars were swerving around the street, trying to keep out of all this glass,” said one passenger in the van. “All he was trying to do was cross the street, and this car hit him.”

The injured man, his neck bloodied, was placed on a stretcher. He said his leg hurt.

“It’s all because of these white (obscenity)!” a woman in the van screamed. A hospital security guard knelt by her side, placed his hand on her knee, comforting her.

Inside, dozens of people filled the hospital lobby, seeking medical attention or waiting for friends and loved ones. A ceiling-mounted television broadcast live reports about still more violence.

“It’s all in Jesus’ hands now,” one woman told another weeping on her shoulder. “There’s nothing you can do.”

Times staff writers Greg Braxton, Marc Lacey and Eric Young contributed to this story.