KING CASE AFTERMATH: A CITY IN CRISIS : An Aftermath of Anguish in Long Beach : Unrest: ‘Oh God, when is it going to stop?’ pleads one merchant after the worst night of fires and looting in city’s history.

In the Cambodian communities along Anaheim Street, the black and Latino neighborhoods of the north end, and east to the borders of well-to-do Belmont Heights, Long Beach residents awoke Friday to skies dulled by smoke, streets littered with glass and abandoned loot and a terrible fear that the worst was yet to come.

“Oh God, when is it going to stop, why are people doing this?” said a tearful Mila Glukhovsky, a Russian immigrant whose Pacific Avenue secondhand store had been ripped apart by looters.

By late afternoon Friday, officials had logged 218 fires, 87 of them serious; 276 had been injured, 96 seriously, and 340 people had been arrested. Two men were pulled from their motorcycle and shot, one fatally. The Department of Motor Vehicles office on Pacific had burned to the ground.

All along Anaheim and Pacific on Friday, merchants and residents began preparing for nightfall. On block after block, store owners were busy hammering pieces of plywood over windows. Many said they planned to spend the night in their shops, guns at their sides.

“My husband has a gun, and I have two BB guns, and we are going to stay here,” Glukhovsky said. “We are not going to let them burn this store. This is all we have. This is our life.”

It was the worst night of fires and looting in Long Beach’s history, concentrated in the southwestern part of the city along commercial strips in largely poor and working-class neighborhoods.

Most of Long Beach was untouched, but the blocks that were hit were hit hard.

“We have come through a long dark night,” said City Manager James C. Hankla, who declared a state of emergency in the city Thursday night and imposed a 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, which remains in effect. “We believe we have a handle on it and will be able to keep a handle on it.”

Police and firefighters were aided by 55 sheriff’s deputies and fire companies from the U. S. Navy and communities as far away as Riverside. A company of the California National Guard and an FBI swat team were sent in to help keep peace Friday night.

“We have taken a forceful attitude,” said Police Chief William C. Ellis. “We will not tolerate looters in our city.”

Mayor Ernie Kell said that local officials had not fully appreciated the city’s explosive potential Thursday night. “I don’t think we anticipated how severe it would be. But we’re on top of it now,” he said Friday.

It took more than 24 hours for the outrage caused by the verdicts in favor of four Los Angeles officers in the Rodney King beating to catch up with Long Beach. When it did, it came with a vengeance.

Widespread looting was reported Thursday throughout North Long Beach, and dozens of fires flared. When Hankla declared a state of emergency at dusk, firefighters were responding to calls every 10 minutes. Within hours, they were faced with a new blaze every three minutes.

A young man and his uncle in search of a grocery store late Thursday night were pulled from their motorcycle, flung to the ground, beaten and robbed. As the two lay in the street, Matt Haines, 32, was killed with a shot to the back of the head. Scott Coleman, 26, was shot three times, but by Friday was back home with relatives.

The police union building was firebombed and Councilman Evan Anderson Braude’s windshield was shattered when someone threw a large object at his car as he was driving down Atlantic Avenue Thursday night. Snipers took pot shots at police near the Carmelitos Housing Project, where violence has flared since Wednesday.

The Foodland on Pacific was turned into a pile of soggy black timber. The nearby Lucky store was looted, a fire set in an aisle and windows broken.

Though many Asian-run businesses were wrecked by looters, Hankla said he did not think the rampages followed an ethnic pattern. “It was more of a geographic thing than an ethnic thing,” he said. “I think it had nothing to do with ethnicity.”

Yet ethnic anger was in the air on some of the most ravaged blocks, along with fear, defiance and the merriment of a no-school day. Teen-agers and children strolled by the wreckage Friday afternoon, gawking at the damage and sometimes helping themselves to what little was left on shelves.

“Ask them will they hire blacks now,” James Brent, a 30-year-old black man said angrily, nodding at the Asian store owners boarding up a looted gift shop on Pacific in the Wrigley District in western Long Beach. “They don’t even speak no (obscenity) English. . . . The only person who works for them is their kind.”

A sign tacked to the store’s boarded up window declared, “Nothing inside. No merchandise. Justice.”

Down the block, an 82-year-old woman sat nervously in front of the building she owns, waiting for her tenants to return with plywood to board up their storefronts. “When they gonna stop this? Nobody knows,” she cried in a thick Greek accent, wringing her hands. “Maybe they come back tonight and burn everything . . . . I sell flowers in the street to save a little money to buy this place and look what happens.”

Police cruised up and down the street, telling clusters of youngsters to go home. But as soon as the officers disappeared around the block, knots of people would collect, straining to see through twisted grates into the gutted shops.

“See those, that’s what I want,” said a teen-age girl, urging a young boy to crawl into a looted shoe shop and fetch one of the few pairs left.

“I’m not backing it up or anything,” said another teen-ager, Tanya Williams. “But there’s a lot of hate. And this is not the end.” The violence and stealing, she said, had gone beyond revenge for the verdict in the King case. “They’re not thinking about Rodney. They’re doing it for themselves.”

Throughout the day Friday, police rolled from hot spot to hot spot, seeming to gain an upper hand as merchants swept up rubble and people toured the boulevards like tourists.

On Friday, a group of Long Beach ministers planned to walk through the most damaged neighborhoods to talk to looters. The Rev. Joe Ealy of the Gospel Memorial Church said he hoped that more than two dozen clergymen would join him.

“We need to let everyone know we care just as much about our community as those who live in Bixby Knolls and Belmont Heights,” Ealy said, referring to two well-to-do neighborhoods.

Across town, Joe Cirivello, owner of Cirivello’s Restaurant on Anaheim Street planned to stand guard Friday night--gun nearby--to defend his property for the second day in a row. The restaurateur was busy organizing neighboring business owners Friday in hopes that others would join him in patrolling the block.

“If we, the residents, the neighbors take a stand, I believe this will stop,” Cirivello said.