AFTERMATH OF THE RIOTS : Siege Mentality Gripped Many as Riots Moved Closer to Home : Reaction: Business was up at filling stations, food stores and gun shops as panic-buying took hold. Residents tell of fear, tension and, in some cases, flight from the area.

Until the smoke from thousands of fires crept eastward like a charcoal fog late last week, the rioting in the Los Angeles area appeared unreal for many--an image of flame on television, a voice of alarm on the radio.

But the acrid clouds transformed the Thursday afternoon sun to a pale, hazy disk. It teared eyes, burned nostrils and permeated the senses. And it threw a pall of fear over residents from Montebello to Long Beach.

People responded as if under siege. They bought ammunition, loaded guns, hid food and waited nervously, inside homes and businesses, for trouble.

Children crawled into bed at night with their parents, and relatives gathered under one roof or fled their neighborhoods entirely. Parents kept students at home and closed businesses. People swarmed into supermarkets and gas stations. Officials canceled softball games, postponed Cinco de Mayo gatherings and imposed curfews.

In the hardest-hit areas, rioters set fires and looters stripped hundreds of businesses clean. Many Compton businesses were devastated, as well as portions of Long Beach, Huntington Park and Lynwood. In addition, there were instances of vandalism, looting and/or fires in South Gate, Whittier, Lakewood, Hawaiian Gardens and Cerritos.

At least three people from Southeast Los Angeles County died in the violence. Some families lost homes. Many more lost the places where they work or shop.

The vast majority of residents did not suffer losses, but constant reminders made the dangers seem all too close: a police helicopter flying overhead, National Guardsmen patrolling street corners, morning commutes past burned-out storefronts and the ever-present sight and smell of smoke in the air.

Few were spared from confronting fear and uncertainty, and people throughout the region had tales to tell about how they and others coped:

“Everybody was afraid, every single customer had fear when you looked at his face,” Downey gas station owner Jim Jameel said. “I was worried like everyone else. . . . You don’t travel. You don’t go nowhere. You go to the store and come straight back.”

Jameel’s crew pumped gas furiously at the Mobil station on the corner of Imperial Highway and Lakewood Boulevard. Business was up 20% as motorists hurriedly topped off tanks in the cindery air. The smoke eclipsed the afternoon sun. Commuters on the nearby San Gabriel River Freeway switched on headlights.

“We couldn’t breathe,” Jameel said. “There was so much smoke in the sky.”

Jameel kept a nightly vigil at his Mobil station, but said that if rioters had come, “We close and we run away. We save our lives first.”

South Gate resident Margaret Travis said she’s rarely been afraid in her 78 years, but the past few days have gotten to her.

“I’ve never had a tight stomach like I’ve had. . . . I’m kind of nauseated,” said Travis, a 46-year resident of the city. She lives less than a mile from a Lynwood shopping center that burned Thursday afternoon.

Travis and her 86-year-old husband, Jack, didn’t leave their home between Thursday and Monday. “All I got were phone calls from all our old people,” said Travis, president of the South Gate Senior Citizen Social Club. “We made a mistake by watching TV. That didn’t help. It was just petrifying.”

After Robert Wise saw looters carry plastic bags full of merchandise past his South Gate home, the 63-year-old veteran got his shotgun from the garage. “I locked the doors, loaded the gun and was waiting,” Wise said. “This is the worst fear I’ve had in a long time.” He saw combat in World War II, “but I was too young then to be scared.”

At a Ralphs market in Norwalk, customers lined up 15 to 20 carts deep late last week. The queue stretched as far back as a neon frozen-food sign more than 100 feet from the 10 checkout counters.

“It was like panic buying,” assistant manager Tim Mitchell said. “Some were afraid they wouldn’t be able to leave their houses or that food would run out.”

Business was double Thursday, triple Friday. Families stocked up on canned goods, bottled water, baby food. Supplies of bread and tortillas ran out for the first time in the store’s history.

“Nothing ever happened like that. It was worse than holiday shopping,” Mitchell said. “It was like there was no tomorrow.”

People were rushed and businesslike, making little eye contact. “They kind of got in and got out and didn’t say very much,” Mitchell said. He noticed a similar phenomenon driving home.

“Normally when you drive around town, people look at you, but people were keeping to themselves,” he said.

About 40 people bought ammunition Thursday morning at Weatherby Sporting Goods in South Gate. “They were people who wanted protection, homeowners and business owners, ordinary folks,” manager Sherman Harns said.

Police ordered ammunition sales halted at noon. After the store closed, one determined motorist decided to reopen it.

The driver rammed a pickup through the barred front door of the Firestone Boulevard shop Thursday at 6 p.m. Owner Ed Weatherby said he thinks police arrived before anything was taken.

“This is most likely the first time in the history of our company we’ve ever had a break-in during daylight hours,” he said.

Business was off as much as 15% at regional malls in Lakewood and Cerritos. Both malls closed at 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday, three hours earlier than normal. Whittier’s Whittwood Mall closed at 5 p.m. The Los Cerritos Mall also shut down early Saturday. Hundreds of businesses and restaurants followed suit. Some of them stayed locked up for several days. Throughout most of the region, there was no curfew, but there might as well have been.

“Not too many people were running around this past week,” said Charlie Hallums, Lakewood Center Mall manager.

Members of the Cerritos Slackers and one other city-league softball team were the only ones who showed at a normally crowded Cerritos Sport Complex Thursday night. Soccer, baseball and softball players usually fill half a dozen fields. Some of the Slackers did not even hang around afterward for pizza and beer. It hardly mattered. No one could find an open restaurant.

Gamblers who frequent area card clubs proved less willing to put their lives at stake than their wages. At the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens and the Regency Club in Bell, business was down about 40% on both Thursday and Friday nights.

Bicycle Club Manager George Hardie said the business suffered its deepest dip since the club opened. And those who did show up had a hard time concentrating on cards.

At the Regency Club, “We had the televisions on, and it seemed like everyone was preoccupied,” one manager said. “The players were just going through the motions. No one was involved with the play.”

Both clubs beefed up security during the riots but kept regular hours. “The only curfew they’ve got here is money,” card player Johnny Grisby said Saturday night at the Bicycle Club.

Hotel desk clerk Grace Serrano fielded calls canceling reservations for a block of rooms at the Norwalk Comfort Inn. “They were vacationers from Mexico, and they said they did not want to come to California,” Serrano said. “We told them that the rioting was not here, but they canceled their reservations anyway.”

Fear had the opposite effect at a Travelodge in Lynwood. The motel was nearly full, not with out-of-towners, but with frightened residents deserting nearby neighborhoods where they expected trouble.

“These were the ones who just said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ ” owner Mike Patel said. “I had eight or 10 groups check in Thursday night.”

The guests soon discovered that they hadn’t fled far enough. Through the night, hotel guests watched hundreds of looters swarm a nearby Viva market, Thrifty Drug Store, and a discount shoe store.

Patel, 32, spent the evening with a phone in one hand and a .38-caliber revolver in the other. “I was afraid they would come over here, and I wanted to be prepared,” he said.

Business owners throughout the region armed against invasion. At the trendy L’Opera restaurant in Long Beach, general manager Antonio Moretti draped large glass windows with white linen tablecloths before darkness fell Thursday. Then, armed with handguns, Moretti joined his boss and some friends for a sleepless night guarding the Pine Avenue eatery.

“I felt like we were at war. (It was) real wild. Anybody could have shot us. We could have shot anybody. There was no control,” Moretti said.

Across town, in the popular seaside neighborhood of Belmont Shore, employees of Billings Paint and Hardware spent part of Thursday night on the store roof armed with handguns, rifles, a powerful spotlight, a police scanner and binoculars.

“We were kind of nervous,” employee Clell McNabb said. “Everything was so sporadic. . . . So we decided that if they attacked us, we’d be ready.”

At Carson Street and Bloomfield Avenue in Hawaiian Gardens, Korean-American business owners set up a protection network in a strip mall that includes a restaurant, flower shop, nail salon and general store. Since Thursday, armed business owners and family members have blocked off the parking lot after dark with their cars.

The merchants quickly expanded their efforts to look after some 70 Korean-owned businesses in Hawaiian Gardens, Cerritos, Norwalk and Lakewood. They also pledged to patrol nearby businesses owned by non-Koreans. They patrol the streets in armed teams of eight and are on call 24 hours a day. They plan to keep up the patrols through the week. They believe that the trouble is far from over, organizer Jonathan Kim said.

In Whittier, 27-year-old Georges Jean spent the night alone with his ear to the radio and a gun strapped to his waist in his just-opened yogurt and pastry shop. He vowed he was ready “to protect my store anyway I can. If my store is destroyed, I’d never be able to put it back together.”

The tension also spread into schools, such as Wilson High in Long Beach. At least six students were treated for cuts and bruises after a group of black and Latino students reportedly chased white students during lunchtime.

Senior Mauricio Rubio, 19, said that the incident began as “a joke” that got out of hand. Nonetheless, he continued, “The administration should have expected trouble from the beginning. You could feel it in the air.”

“A bunch of Hispanics started throwing food at us and said ‘You are white,’ 14-year-old April Wagner said. “Then they said, ‘We’re going to hurt you like (police) hurt Rodney King--for no reason.’ ”

Wagner said she and a friend ran into the library while other white students ran into classrooms or jumped over a fence to get away from blacks and Latinos who had surrounded them in the school’s outdoor eating area. She described the incident as “scary” and said a friend suffered a cut lip from a blow to the face.

Administrators called Long Beach police, turned on automatic sprinklers to disperse students and--ironically--took out video cameras to record potential assailants. Principal Larry Burnight said that many black and white students later hugged each other and apologized for what happened.

The district canceled Friday classes, as did neighboring school districts in Lynwood, Compton and Paramount. Most classes resumed Monday. Compton schools resumed Tuesday.

At Wilson High as well as other area schools, students said tensions remained high.

More than a third of some 1,550 students failed to show for class at Clearwater Intermediate School in Paramount last Thursday. Many parents picked up children early, hurriedly, with worried expressions and little to say. Only 10 of 25 students arrived for teacher Lois Booth’s sixth-grade class.

“When I let the kids out Thursday, there were plumes of smoke. It looked like three or four blocks away,” Booth said. “We were outside encouraging students to go straight home.”

Sixth-grader Sokhum Mony said her mother compared the riots to what she had experienced as a refugee in Southeast Asia. “My Mom said this was worse than the war she had seen in Cambodia,” Sokhum said.

When 11-year-old Lauvao Ahfook got home, he locked all the doors and windows. Other students said their families started storing and even hiding food supplies.

“My parents told me I can’t go out,” sixth-grader Chris Rhoades said.

Said Melissa Sullivan, 11: “We’re all scared in Paramount. . . . How can you forget something when 50 people are killed and 1,000 injured?”

In the end, little damage occurred in Paramount, a city bordered by riot-torn Compton and North Long Beach.

But fearing the worst last Thursday night, Mayor Elvira Amaro declared a state of emergency, and ordered scores of city employees to work overtime to help maintain calm. Workers hauled giant drain pipes across Rosecrans Avenue, Alondra Boulevard and Somerset Boulevard to act as barricades against potential rioters. Officials estimate the price tag for the special assistance may run into the hundreds of thousand of dollars.

The city of Norwalk taped reassuring messages from city leaders to dispel rumors that rioters were tearing the town apart. The city aired the 30-minute videotape on the local cable television station throughout the weekend.

Despite the increasing calm, some of the fear dissipated more slowly than the smoke from the fires. Late Friday morning in Cerritos, a frustrated customer banged futilely at the door of Roma Shoes, hoping to retrieve shoes he’d left there. The store was boarded up so tight that it looked to be out of business. “Keep knocking,” said a merchant from next door. “They’re in there; they’re just afraid.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Gerald Faris, Jill Gottesman, Roxana Kopetman, Paul McLeod and Vicki Torres, and community correspondents Sarah M. Brown, Phil Garcia, John Pope, Suzan Schill and Julia Wilson.