Bush Sends Troops to L.A. : Police Gain Upper Hand in Turmoil : Unrest: Deaths placed at 40. Injury total is 1,400 since outbreak of violence Wednesday.

National Guard troops and police wrestled to gain control of riot-ravaged neighborhoods across Los Angeles on Friday amid indications that authorities were gaining the upper hand for the first time in three days of the worst urban unrest in Los Angeles history.

In a city that has long boasted about the richness of its multicultural flavor, it had come on Friday to mirror the worst of its war-torn neighbors to the south, as military equipment rolled down boulevards, men with automatic weapons stood sentry and a dusk-to-dawn curfew kept residents indoors.

In developments Friday:

In a highly visible show of force, hundreds of armed guardsmen moved into troubled spots, maintaining calm at post offices and grocery stores as thousands of panicked residents rushed to pick up Social Security and welfare checks and prepared for an uncertain weekend.

* President Bush sent 1,000 federal law officers to the city--including 200 members of the U.S. marshal’s special operations group that was sent in 1990 to Panama to take dictator Manuel Noriega into custody--and ordered 4,500 military troops into Los Angeles to help quell the violence. Federal and local officials said the muscle-flexing, decried as being long overdue by many in ransacked areas of the city, was meant to “ensure the safety of the streets” before the weekend.

* Police reports placed the number of deaths at 40 with at least 10 killed by law enforcement officers. An additional 1,400 injuries have been reported, including three police officers, since the violence erupted following Wednesday’s not guilty verdicts in the case of four Los Angeles police officers charged with beating black motorist Rodney G. King.

* The death toll, combined with property damage estimates exceeding $500 million, added an inauspicious historic dimension to the three-day disturbance: The unrest eclipsed the 1965 Watts riots as the costliest and deadliest urban disorder in Los Angeles history. The worst rioting in the United States occurred in Detroit in July, 1967, leaving 43 dead, more than 2,000 injured and $200 million in property damage.

* Although the violence had subsided substantially Friday, giving residents time to catch their breath and clean up, scattered fires still flared, including one in Long Beach, where a Department of Motor Vehicles building was torched.

* The civil strife is likely to extend and worsen Southern California’s battered economy. Fires have closed thousands of businesses and idled uncounted workers. Continuing disruptions will hurt tourism, retailing and service industries; put an added burden on banks and other financial institutions, and ultimately strain city, county and state budgets.

* By late Friday afternoon, more than 4,400 people had been arrested countywide. In the rush to make room for those who had been arrested, officials moved about 1,200 inmates from county jails to state prisons, forgoing the normally cumbersome paperwork process.

On the third day of unrest, the Altadena motorist whose name has been the haunting rallying cry of rioters, made his first public appearance since his beating last year. He appealed for calm and denounced the mayhem as senseless.

“It’s just not right. It’s not right, and it’s not gonna change anything,” King, 26, told a crowded news conference, his voice choked with nervousness and emotion. “We’ll get our justice. They’ve won the battle, but they haven’t won the war. We’ll have our day in court, and that’s all we want.”

Indeed, King’s brief remarks came as officials in Washington indicated that the U.S. Justice Department is likely to seek criminal indictments of the officers involved in the March 3, 1991, beating. In a highly unusual announcement, the officials said the department has convened a federal grand jury in the case and that a subpoena had been issued Friday “in furtherance” of the grand jury inquiry.

The overnight curfew in Los Angeles and neighboring areas, extended by officials for a third day into this morning, left much of the smoldering city in a nervous calm. Freeways and surface streets were almost deserted, as were restaurants, theaters and sporting arenas. In some areas, only the homeless--with nowhere else to turn--remained outdoors.

Even so, daybreak on Friday was regarded in some neighborhoods only as an invitation to renew the looting, arson and shooting. A thick pall of smoke still hung over much of the Los Angeles Basin, fires burned from Hollywood to South Los Angeles, and new outbreaks of violence erupted in Long Beach, the Harbor area, Mid-City and in the San Fernando Valley community of Panorama City.

Vermont Avenue was one of the hardest-hit streets. For a 10-mile stretch from Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood to Manchester Boulevard in South Los Angeles, the scene was one of devastation.

Entire blocks were burned out. Traffic signals no longer worked. Glass littered the streets. Police in riot gear, joined by National Guard units, stood guard at two post offices while thousands waited in line to get their government benefit checks.

At least one fire was set Friday along the street--in an abandoned beauty supply store on 57th and Vermont. A volunteer federal firefighter, who normally spends his days working as a fire inspector, struggled to put out the blaze with a lone fire hose until reinforcements from the Los Angeles Fire Department arrived. By that time, the building was fully engulfed, as was the adjacent shop.

But for every horror story of fire and violence, there seemed to be a tale of neighborliness or heroism. Cleanup efforts were under way along the northern part of Vermont Avenue, in the Mid-City, Mid-Wilshire and Hollywood districts. There, volunteers from various churches, supplied with brooms, shovels and gloves, swept up glass and boarded broken windows.

Not all the heroics had happy endings. In Inglewood, a 24-year-old good Samaritan died trying to save a burning store near his home. Kevin Evanshen died early Friday morning after plunging through a weakened roof on Inglewood Boulevard while helping put out flames in a looted check-cashing store, police said.

Evanshen had climbed a ladder onto the single-story roof to pour water through a burning hole when the roof gave way. He was helping the owner of a neighboring television store, which had been looted along with several other businesses in the complex of stores at Inglewood and Braddock Drive in the Del Rey section of Los Angeles, according to LAPD Detective Bob Nelson.

“The guy was really trying and when he got up on that roof, he probably didn’t know how bad that fire was below him,” Nelson said.

Nelson said investigators concluded that the fire was set deliberately and Evanshen’s death was being treated as a homicide. Police said it was the first time in the three days of rioting that a good Samaritan had been killed fighting a fire.

Other deaths ranged from opportunistic gang slayings to police shootouts with suspected thieves and snipers. The coroner’s office also received an increasing number of burn victims as bodies were reclaimed from the rubble of hundreds of charred buildings.

In all, 10 people were killed in encounters with police, four were burned, one was beaten, one stabbed and the rest were slain by gunshots that rang out sporadically in neighborhoods from Lennox to Long Beach. Most of the victims were black, though at least nine were Latino, three Anglo and one Asian-American.

People were able to move around in relative calm Friday--for the first time in two days--thanks in large part to the heightened military presence.

National Guard units were scattered throughout the city, and where the units were in place, residents were glad to see them. Many said the troops were a welcome sight compared to the seemingly ineffectual officers of the LAPD.

But where there were no guards present, there was fear, anguish and outrage.

“This morning, we came and there were none here,” said Victor Perez, who brought his son to a burned-out mall at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Vermont. The two of them were sweeping the area clean, hoping others would follow their lead and stop the destruction.

“If some guards were here, maybe this wouldn’t have happened,” Perez added.

A few blocks away, a dozen Guard troops were massed with local law enforcement officials, protecting a partially ransacked ABC Market.

“We experienced some frustration getting them here,” said LAPD Cmdr. Michael Bostic, who had Guard units under his command at the market. “Our frustration was that we needed the extra help, but we’re starting to get it now.”

J.W. Johnson stood in the shadow of burned-out doctor’s office, feeling safe for the first time in days. The National Guard was massing in the parking lot of the ABC Market at Vermont and Vernon, and Johnson, a retired railroad worker, said he believed the Guard was his community’s best hope for ending the violence.

But even as they welcomed the troops, Johnson and others complained that it had taken so long for them for arrive. During the delay, Johnson said, store after store was pillaged and torched.

Columns of smoke still rose from the string of small shops across Vermont from the market.

“If they had gotten here yesterday, they could have saved this,” he said. “Now it’s gone. Where am I going to shop? Where are all these people going to shop?” Joe Kazazian, owner of an auto repair shop and U-Haul franchise on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood was also angry about the slow response, even though is business had not been damaged.

“It only took them 24 hours to occupy Panama,” he complained. “They should have sent the troops right away and give them orders to shoot.”

At a City Hall, some city officials expressed similar frustration with the slow response. Mayor Tom Bradley told reporters he requested the federal military assistance because of delays in the dispatching of up to 4,000 National Guardsmen he had requested when rioting began Wednesday.

“That was one of the turning points in our decision to call on the President,” Bradley said. Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani was more blunt in an interview later. “The bottom line is that the mayor was dissatisfied with the speed of deployment of National Guardsmen,” Fabiani said.

In the long run, according to local economists, the riots will add to the negative image of Los Angeles and Southern California as a place to do business, even as civic and business leaders redouble their efforts to retain and attract jobs and companies. In one effort Friday, the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency approved $20 million in emergency relief assistance and grants to rebuild small businesses and homes in redevelopment areas hit by the riots.

But in the short term, getting on with life for many residents has been a monumental task.

Jose Mojica was on his way back to Los Angeles from a vacation in his native Mexico when the rioting broke out. “I came to work, and I saw this,” he said, shaking his head in disgust as he surveyed the wreckage Friday morning.

Smashed glass, charred sneakers, splintered boards and the pervasive stench of smoke marked what had once been the store Mojica managed--an electronics and sporting goods shop at Western and Santa Monica called LA Discount that was looted and burned.

“Right now, I’m out of a job,” said Mojica, a father of three. “And my customers--a lot of them had things on layaway. How are they gonna get their money back?”

“People say the black people did it--but I don’t think so. This is a Latino neighborhood. It was our own people too,” he said. “We’re gonna kill each other--that’s all there is to it.”

Mail delivery has been suspended in some of the worst-hit and poorest areas of the city, leaving thousands of residents with little choice but to fight crowds at post offices if they wanted money for the weekend.

The first and the 15th of each month are typically special days in these areas--and also tense times for mail carriers--because government assistance checks arrive. But Friday’s ordeal was by far the worst for many.

“I’ve got no choice but to be out here in line. I’ve got rent to pay and if I don’t get the check I might be out of a place to stay,” said Michael Dalton, 46, one of hundreds waiting outside the post office at Broadway and Manchester in South Los Angeles. “If I don’t get the check, there’s a good chance my lights and gas would be cut off.”

A potentially explosive situation simmered throughout the day at the Hancock Station post office in South Los Angeles, just blocks from where some of the worst rioting occurred the day before. An hour before the post office was scheduled to open, nearly 200 people were waiting outside, the line stretching for blocks past a burned-out market and a flag pole that displayed just a charred shred of Old Glory.

When the post office opened, the impatient crowd was funneled through one door and led to six open windows inside. Behind the workers at the window, 15 other postal employees scrambled to find checks. But the going was slow as everyone was required to provide an ID. There was pushing in line and there were attempts to sneak toward the front.

“Lots of problems,” said a postal inspector, holding a shotgun by the front door. “No IDs, people trying to pick it up for someone else, logistical problems, you name it.”

Outside, the scene resembled a frantic auction with anxious residents, the vast majority of them women, pushing forward, calling out, flashing pieces of identification above their heads--all in the hope of getting inside faster.

There were several close calls, especially when two people in line began to fight. Someone fell and there was a loud noise. Some feared it was a gunshot. The crowd scattered and more guardsmen were called in.

“At this rate you’re gettin’ nowhere fast,” Delores Smith, 62, said to one of the postal officials. A child-care provider who lives nearby, she was worried that any incident could provoke a burning of the post office.

“Enough of this stuff!” she shouted.

“They took down the boxes,” she said, referring to the roving mobs that had smashed regular mailboxes throughout the area. It seemed ludicrous to invite an already tense local population to pick up checks in what amounted to a near mob scene, she complained.

“They can’t cash the darn things no way,” she said. “This is causing another problem. Where are they going to spend the damn checks? They burned everything down. . . . They’re gonna burn this down too.”

As the afternoon sun grew unbearably hot, two trucks drove up and delivered about 100 crates of water jugs for the people in line. A worker said it was a donation at the urging of Mayor Bradley, “so these people don’t get hostile out there.”

Soon after, a flatbed truck came by, delivering portable toilets.

Those lucky enough to have money encountered problems too, especially trying to buy food in the most ravaged parts of the city.

At the Original 32nd Street Market at University Village near USC, thousands of Latino and black shoppers from South Los Angeles asked the same nagging questions of store managers:

“Is it safe? Is it secure? And do you have enough groceries?”

Owner Morrie Notrica said he expected the store to serve up to 27,000 shoppers by sundown Friday--three times his daily average.

“These poor people have nowhere else to go,” he said. “It’s sad. The big boys--Ralphs, ABC and Boys markets--all went down. We can hardly handle this.”

One of the grateful shoppers was Ruby Young, 31.

“Everything burned down in my neighborhood,” she said. “I have no place else to go.”

The same could be said for about 200 people who waited in line outside the market--sharing the parking lot with rifle-toting National Guard soldiers in camouflage fatigues--to cash their welfare and Social Security checks, then stock up on groceries for the weekend. Notrica said, however, he expected the market to run out of cash at about 5 p.m.

“I’ve got a lot of patience,” Notrica said, “but I’m running out of money.”

Amid the chaos in the store, Notrica remained calm, even when a worker ran up and warned: “A little girl just tried to start a fire in the women’s restroom.”

“Seal the bathroom,” Notrica said. “Lock it up.”

Then he disappeared into the crowd to keep the shoppers moving.

This report was written by staff writer Dean E. Murphy