Beaten Driver a Searing Image of Mob Cruelty

At every watershed through time, it seems a face emerges to transfix a moment in history. In Vietnam, a naked girl fled napalm. In Tian An Men Square, a single student stared down a line of Chinese tanks. In Los Angeles last year, Rodney G. King lay prone and beaten.

Now, a white gravel truck driver beaten nearly into oblivion in South Los Angeles has become the face on the flip side of the Rodney King coin, the unofficial black-on-white response to the official white-on-black beating.

His name is Reginald Oliver Denny. He is 36. He is alive because four strangers--four black strangers who saw him dragged from his truck and beaten nearly to death--emerged from the crowd to drive his unwieldly 18-wheeler out of pandemonium to safety.

The rescuers were two women and two men: a young nutrition consultant, a laid-off data control worker, an unemployed aerospace worker and a still-unidentified young man in black whose fellow rescuers first feared was a gangbanger coming to finish Denny off.

“Those people didn’t even know him and risked their lives to aid him,” said Don Kelley, 28, Denny’s roommate. “If no one had helped him, he would be dead.”

The rescue came almost too late--as long as 20 to 30 minutes after the beating. At least two of the rescuers found themselves lured to the scene by the power of television pictures, broadcast live from helicopters hovering over the intersection of Normandie and Florence avenues.

“We were watching TV at home,” said T.J. Murphy, 30, the aerospace engineer. “ ‘Somebody’s got to get that guy out of there,’ we said to each other.”

As they got in their car to check out the brewing neighborhood confrontation, they never thought that the rescue would fall to them.

But when they arrived, the police were nowhere to be seen.

Instead, the gravely injured man--his face awash in blood and his eyes swollen shut--had somehow managed to get back behind the wheel and was trying to make his getaway an inch at a time.

Braving hostile onlookers, stalled cars and general chaos, Murphy and his friend joined two others who eventually helped deliver Denny to the door of the Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital emergency room. Just as the big rig drove up to the door, Denny went into convulsions and started spitting up blood.

“One more minute, just one more minute, and he would have been dead,” one of the rescuers said a paramedic told him at the door.

The incident started a couple of hours after not guilty verdicts were returned in the trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating King. Denny, a $16.70-an-hour driver, had been dispatched from an Azusa quarry at 5:39 p.m. just as news of the verdicts was getting out.

His job was routine: to deliver 27 tons of sand to an Inglewood cement-mixing plant. His red cab pulled two loaded bins. He took the usual route, San Bernardino Freeway west, south on the Harbor, off at Florence.

This unlikely symbol of a city’s torment probably did not even know that there was rioting ahead. On the road, he tuned his radio to country-Western stations. He was “a totally passive guy” who did not watch much TV or even subscribe to a newspaper, friends said.

“He’s John Q. Public,” said Charles May, his boss at Transit Mixed Concrete, which has set up a trust fund for Denny. “It was unfortunate that he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

About 6:30 p.m. the rig trundled to the intersection where the first violence had erupted--bottle and rock throwing, overturned trash cans. As Denny slowed in the midst of the melee, the rig was surrounded by about five black men.

One rioter yanked open the truck door and pulled Denny from his cab. At least two others beat his head and kicked him, knocking him to the asphalt. After kicking him, one man raised his hands up in triumph. Denny tried to move, turning on his side. Another man bashed his skull with a fire extinguisher from the truck.

As he lay on the ground, another man walked up and for about eight seconds rifled through his pockets, sprinting away with Denny’s wallet.

By the time Murphy, 30, arrived with his friend Tee Barnett, 28, the pair saw no choice but to intervene. “It was just like Rodney King,” Murphy said. “They beat, beat and beat him.”

But the crowd that appeared uniformly angry and brutal on TV contained people of goodwill, Murphy said. After the cameras had cut away, someone must have helped Denny back into his cab.

A young nutrition consultant on her way home from work then hoisted herself onto the side of the truck and was shouting steering instructions to Denny, whose eyes were swollen shut. To the right, she would yell, now to the left.

As the truck inched forward, a black clad young man--who Murphy initially thought was a gang member--jumped in the driver’s seat. The consultant climbed inside the cab to console the injured man, and Murphy took over the job of guiding the new driver, who was unable to see through the shattered windshield.

“You’re going make it,” the consultant kept telling Denny, even as she had to hold him upright. “You’re going to be OK.”

As the young driver tried desperately to speed up the awkward, heavy rig, Barnett drove in front of the truck, putting on her hazard lights to try to clear the way.

After a trip that seemed to take hours, the rig screeched into the driveway at Daniel Freeman hospital.

Earlier, 20 miles away in Covina, Jerry Cole, Denny’s next-door neighbor and friend, was riveted to the television, watching the mayhem in Los Angeles streets. Then he noticed the along blond hair, the red cab and a pair of familiar black boots.

“My heart sank to my stomach. It was Reggie,” Cole said.

Denny’s roommate was horrified by the same televised scene.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” said roommate Don Kelley, 28. “He was just lying there. No one was helping. We got two baseball bats and said ‘Let’s go get him.’ ”

But before they left, the phone rang with news that Denny was at the hospital.

Shelley Montez, 29, Denny’s former wife, kept their daughter Ashley from the television, telling her only that “daddy happened to be in the middle of big fight and people took their anger out on him.”

Denny underwent three hours of emergency brain surgery about midnight to remove two blood clots. By daybreak he had stabilized, Montez said. He was in critical but stable condition Thursday afternoon.

“We got the most wonderful news this morning,” she said Thursday. “He can squeeze his hands and wiggle his feet. He nodded ‘no’ when a nurse asked him if he was in pain.”

When Denny’s neighbor and roommate reached the hospital, they could barely recognize their friend. Cole said Denny’s head was swollen like a “big round ball of water.” His fingers and arms were crusted with blood. His eyes were swollen shut, a respirator tube jammed down his throat.

“I told him everything was going to be OK. We care about him, we love him,” Kelley said. He believed that Denny heard him and saw a tear that rolled from his right eye.

In the end, Denny’s friends and rescuers reached out to find each other--his rescuers in hopes of finding out how Denny had fared, and his family in hopes of thanking them.

“We found out that both Denny and I had 8-year-old daughters,” said Barnett on Thursday.

“Black boys playing with white boys--that’s what Dr. King talked about. Working together. Playing together. But his dream doesn’t stand a chance, does it? Not until people learn to get along. Evidently, we’re not living the same dream.”

As for the man dressed in black, Murphy and Barnett said they never got his name. He and another man who had helped block traffic for the caravan to the hospital drove the big-rig back to the cement company lot and vanished.