Families in the Riot Areas Try to Pick Up the Pieces : Survival: After five nights of living in fear, many try to settle back into everyday routines. Others look to leave.

At the street corner where the Los Angeles riots began, Roy and Laverne Walker had endured five nights of terror--watching fires, hearing gunshots, doing without lights or a phone and sleeping on the floor for safety.

But on Monday, the jittery Walkers could look to the streets and see calm. They could dress and feed their 21-month-old daughter, Saida, in a household where the lights worked, where the phone was on. A gardener came by, expecting to be paid, and for the first time in days a mail carrier completed his appointed rounds.

“Is that it? No bills?” asked Walker, 41, a state police officer, accepting a stack of junk mail at the couple’s neat, middle-class home near Normandie Avenue, where, miraculously, even the rosebushes survived the most violent unrest in city history.

Without fanfare, and with uncertain prospects of help from authorities or charitable organizations, the Walkers and untold numbers of other families in Los Angeles were beginning to pick up the pieces of their homes, shops and battered psyches.

For many, Monday brought a welcome sense of the routine, a spring day’s respite from the raging onslaught of violence. There were bills to pay, groceries to buy, errands to run. There were windows to replace, plywood sheets to take down. There were moments of shared grief, moments of relief, even levity, and moments to reflect on the horrors of a week gone haywire.

Like the Walkers, Koreatown businessman Charles Yoon has decided he will leave Los Angeles, and as soon as he possibly can. Birdell Wright, a soft-spoken Sunday schoolteacher who watched parts of Long Beach burn, was left trying to comprehend not only the violence, but also the stunning verdicts in the Rodney G. King trial that touched it off.

Darlinda Davis of Compton, who is seven months pregnant, struggled to erase from her mind the harrowing images of looters and arsonists and an all-night fire that threatened to destroy her home.

And Raubi Sundher, who spent four days and nights holed up inside the Hollywood Wax Museum, was back at work there Monday, looking out for the family business while wondering how Hollywood could ever recover.

Roy Walker, a product of South Los Angeles who has lived in the same home for 17 years, came away from the worst rioting in city history with personal baggage: He was left to agonize over the turn of events Wednesday night as the violence began. Right outside his home--at the epicenter of the unrest--mobs began pulling motorists from cars and beating them in the streets.

Although trained as a peace officer, Walker only stood and watched from his own doorway.

“I felt so helpless,” he said. “I’ve been tortured ever since . . . feeling helpless, wanting to do something but not knowing what to do. Could I have made a difference? Or would I have been another statistic? It has been on my mind constantly.”

The ensuing days unfolded in kaleidoscopic images of anarchy. Walker ran out for kerosene and batteries for flashlights, but the family was unable to do laundry or get food. On Thursday, Walker was due at work at 10 a.m. but arrived at 1 in the afternoon. His supervisors yelled at him, he said, and he was forced to explain--before donning his riot gear to take to the streets--that it had been impossible to phone in. Service was out in the entire neighborhood.

With her husband working late, Laverne Walker tried to look after the baby. They slept together on the bedroom floor for fear of gunfire.

“I heard shots,” she said. “I was afraid to go to the window.”

Like other families, the Walkers are thinking of finding a new home elsewhere, maybe in Palmdale or Lancaster. And Walker is kicking himself. “I really screwed up,” he said. “I have a gold card. Why did I bother staying? I should have just taken my family out of the neighborhood and put them up at a hotel.”

Charles Yoon, the owner of a key copying shack in a mini-mall in Koreatown, answered his portable phone. After taking a few seconds to recognize the caller, he looked across the street on Monday to Nice Fashions, a boarded-up dress shop.

“Oh, yes, it’s still locked up,” Yoon, 63, reassured the shop’s owner. “Looks fine. Don’t worry about a thing.”

Like the dress shop, Yoon’s key shack at 8th Street and Vermont Avenue survived the riots without major looting or damage. However, on Monday, Yoon was one of the mini-mall’s first tenants to return to work.

All around him, less fortunate businesses showed the ravages of recent days. Adjoining his tiny establishment, an electronics store had been hit by a pickup truck, then plundered by looters who carried away hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise. Its battered facade was a mute legacy of the ransacking.

Nearby, only steel girders and ash were left of a string of six Korean- and Vietnamese-owned shops that also were devastated.

As Yoon listened to Korean-language radio and looked out at what was left of the street, he talked of spiritual damage that would be difficult, if not impossible, to repair. Since he moved to Koreatown three years ago from Orange County, returning to Korea has been in the back of his mind, Yoon said.

Now, he is sure he will go back, as soon as his son finishes two years of art school.

“Sure, I’ve considered staying for good,” Yoon said of Los Angeles. “But this is not the way I want to live for the rest of my life.”

Yoon, who hadn’t made a sale since closing early Wednesday afternoon when he heard the King verdicts, sat watching the street Monday. At last, a customer showed up, a man who needed two keys copied. The total sale: $2.

“I didn’t have much of anything to lose in the first place,” Yoon said, motioning toward a box of watch batteries and a padlock display, which were among Yoon’s undisturbed merchandise. “I gave my rifle to the others (in the mall), so they could protect their businesses. I’m ready to go back (to Seoul).”

Never in her life had Birdell Wright, 69, seen anything like it.

Shopping strips were on fire, sending acrid smoke through her neighborhood of neat, modest stucco houses in West Long Beach. Stores that weren’t burning were boarded shut. The state Department of Motor Vehicles building a few miles away was in charred ruins. Even the clothes that one of her daughters had taken to the local dry cleaners had been destroyed when the shop was firebombed.

On top of all that, Wright tried vainly to grasp not-guilty verdicts received by the four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney G. King. “I have never felt such rage,” recalled Wright, who sings in her church choir.

“Then I started praying. I was walking around the house praying for myself because of this terrible rage. . . . As I began to pray, tears came. I just cried and cried,” she said. “Then a terrible sadness was inside me.”

Throughout much of the weekend, Wright stayed inside with her husband, Artis, and her two grown daughters, who live with them. But on Saturday, desperate for some diversion, she ventured to Torrance with a friend to look at the South Coast Botanic Garden. “It helped a lot.”

On Sunday, Wright and one of her daughters decided to go out for breakfast. They had to try three restaurants before they found one that was open.

On Monday, however, Wright’s daughters returned to work and shops were reopening. Wright was going to do some gardening in her flower beds.

And yet the emotional toll remained; the neighborhood, the city at large, would never really be the same.

“You’re driving along and you usually turn at a landmark and the landmark’s not there. It’s a pile of rubble,” said Wright, a retired aide for the Long Beach school system.

Wright’s daughter, Joani, spoke of being near tears because the destruction had crept into her community. Yet she also noted a feeling of camaraderie among those trying to deal with the crisis. At stores that began reopening, she said, “people were smiling or nodding their head. People are coming together. I don’t know if it will last.”

As soon as the verdicts came in, Darlinda Davis--seven months pregnant and at home in Compton with their 2-year-old daughter--called her husband, Delton, at the Gardena Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise he manages.

“They are gonna let those men go,” she said, near tears.

“There is going to be a riot,” he answered quickly, needed no more explanations. “Stay in the house.”

“I just start crying and everything got worse and worse,” she recalled. “I put my daughter down to bed, because I didn’t want her to see any of this.”

Sure enough, three hours later, the trouble began. From the window of their Compton Boulevard home, Darlinda watched 20 cars pull up to the neighboring swap meet store, and a sick feeling gripped her. For the next five hours, the neighborhood was filled with strangers running with their arms filled with clothes, electronic equipment, beauty supplies, jewelry, everything that could be carried or dragged.

Just before midnight, the store exploded in fire. Huge, searing flames quickly spread to the neighboring Baptist church and sent the Davises running outdoors to hose down their home of four years.

The fire burned for more than 12 hours, littering the Davises’ yard with ash and debris. But the home was spared.

After that, everything seemed to pass in a blur, Darlinda recalled.

She remembers driving through Compton with Delton and her mother, watching in disbelief as looters darted through traffic. She went to the Salvation Army to get bread for dinner because she couldn’t find a store that was open. The organization gave her not only bread, but a bagful of groceries and three spaghetti dinners.

She remembers a man asking her if she wanted to buy some rings he had just stolen.

She remembers the nightmares that came to her Thursday night.

“Something terrible--the ultimate something awful--was chasing a bunch of us, but it wanted me because I had something that it wanted and it kept coming and coming,” she said, recalling one dream.

By Sunday, everything had quieted down. The nightmares stopped. On Monday morning, Delton returned to his job. Darlinda, rested from the first solid sleep she had had since Wednesday, spent the morning sorting through their bills while a soap opera droned on the TV in the background.

Later, she would go to the bank, grab a quick burger and salad at a fast-food restaurant and finish braiding her daughter’s hair--a chore she had started Wednesday. She planned to go see her husband at the store and then simply relax.

“We are just trying to get back into a routine,” she said on her way to the bank. “I don’t think things will get back to normal here for a while.”

For someone who spent most of four days and nights holed up inside the Hollywood Wax Museum, Raubi Sundher was coping well.

“I’m tired, I’m angry and I’m trying to figure how we can get on our feet again,” said Sundher, 32, who manages the tourist attraction his father founded 27 years ago, during the summer of the Watts rebellion.

For Sundher, the riots were surreal. He found himself snuggled up with a shotgun and a sleeping bag on the off chance that anyone would want to break in and make off with a wax figure of Ronald Reagan.

Unlike some other nearby establishments, including the landmark Frederick’s of Hollywood, the museum was unharmed. But as a few merchants along Hollywood Boulevard worked to sweep up debris, Sundher recounted his own four-day ordeal and tried to imagine how Hollywood would restore its battered image with tourists.

“We’ve got a big-time image problem on our hands,” he said, peering at a television monitor of the wax museum’s entrance, which was deserted at midday except for a lone ticket-taker. “As you can see, the actual damage in Hollywood wasn’t that great, but the people we depend on--the people back in the heartland--will connect Hollywood and riots, and we’ve got to worry if they’re still going to want to come.”

As the upheaval began, Sundher saw the sporting goods store across the street looted, the flea market down the street torched and a friend’s leather shop several blocks away emptied of $300,000 worth of merchandise. “At one point, I walked up to a policeman and said, ‘You know they’re looting down there,’ ” he recalled, referring to the leather store, “and he just said, ‘Thank you,’ and did nothing.”

From Thursday afternoon to Sunday morning, Sundher said, he never left the wax museum, except to swap guard duty with other family members at the Guinness World of Records attraction across the boulevard, which the family also owns.

Luckily, the museum features a fully stocked refrigerator, which was loaded with pizza, cold cuts and other foods.

“I remember as a kid hating this place at night, how dark and spooky it was, and how after the lights went out all you could see were these glass eyes that seemed to stare at you in the darkness,” Sundher said.

But last week, the real horrors were outside, out where the city was burning.

“Hey, this is our life,” he said, explaining why he stayed to stand guard. “This is everything we own. No way were we not going to stay and protect it.”