AFTER THE RIOTS: THE SEARCH FOR ANSWERS : Students Try to Make Sense of Images, Death : Healing: Sessions at Golden West College, UCI sift violence and destruction of recent days in an attempt to achieve emotional catharsis.

Claudia Perez’s voice quivered as she told the crowd at Golden West College on Wednesday how one friend had been killed during the rioting in the Los Angeles and another had been shot in the back and paralyzed.

“People died because of the mistakes of the police system,” she said. “We need to take a step back and look at what we’ve done.”

Perez, 21, of Huntington Beach was among 450 students, teachers and administrators at a teach-in about the Rodney G. King verdicts and the riots that followed. A similar event took place at UC Irvine, where about 25 faculty and students gathered Wednesday to discuss their feelings about last week’s violence.

Hearkening to the 1960s when students held teach-ins about the Vietnam War, Golden West College students at the noon gathering emphasized the need to think about what had occurred and to consider what to do next.

“We want to stop running on emotions and start thinking,” said Eric Arnold, 29, the event’s organizer. “We want to get people talking, not yelling; thinking, not emoting.”

College President Judith Valles said the rioting “was very shocking, but it did not come as a surprise to those of us who have been witnessing and talking about what is happening in our inner cities. This is just the beginning of the world all of us will be inheriting. It is a microcosm of what is happening in our country where the gap of economic inequality is increasing.”

She urged the students to consider how they could solve the problems facing the nation and its inner cities.

“We are all Americans. We may have different colors, or accents, but we are all Americans,” Valles said.

Anthony Richards, 20, a member of the Black Student Union, expressed horror at the King beating and the verdicts, but said, “Neither of these incidents touched me as deeply as the rioting that followed. Violence was not the answer. Let’s make this a learning experience. We can’t change the past, but we must learn from it.”

Coni Kohan, 35, of Westminster said she was angry that Orange County legislators opposed increasing sales taxes to help rebuild Los Angeles.

“They said Orange County doesn’t want to be a part of that because we didn’t do it. Well, we all did it. Orange County needs to share the wealth. They can’t hold on to their wealth and live behind a brick wall,” Kohan said.

Kohan urged everyone to register to vote and to elect new leaders, a call repeated throughout the afternoon.

Meanwhile, at the UCI Student Center, a small group of students and teachers discussed their reactions to the verdicts and listened to each other’s personal anecdotes about racial prejudice.

The gathering, organized by the counseling center, was intended to allow for “emotional catharsis,” said Thomas Parham, the center’s director.

Corina Espinoza, director of UCI’s Cross-Cultural Center and a panelist, said: “I was hesitant about doing this because I haven’t processed (the rioting). My reaction to seeing the violence was I had the same potential.”

Sarah Johnson, assistant dean of students, said she watched the trial almost every day but did not discuss the verdicts with anyone until Wednesday.

“For the first two days after the verdict, I put on a badge that said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ ” said Johnson, who is black. “As a Christian, I’m supposed to love everyone. Not being sure how I would react, the best way to deal with it was to keep my mouth shut.”

Some said they were so outraged by the verdicts that they might have joined in last week’s rioting. But many accused the media of describing African-Americans as mobs and hoodlums and thereby fueling racial hostilities.

“Had I been in that area at the time, I don’t know how I would have reacted,” said Lavada Austin, a psychologist in the university’s counseling center who is black. “The media on the one hand talks about mobs and hoodlums to describe African-Americans. . . . Where do Korean-Americans get their perceptions of African-Americans? Again, we have to look at the media.”

Another staff psychologist, Ruth Gim, a Korean-American, said members of her family talked about blacks in a derogatory way when they discussed the riots.

“At a gut level, I still haven’t worked through this,” Gim said. “I devote my life to this area, multiculturalism. At times, I feel so helpless. I’m so angry that nothing’s changed. In my own community, there is a lot of racism.”

The participants talked about the need to remove barriers between racial groups on campus. Panel discussions and speakers may be scheduled for the future.

But for some, mourning will be the next step.

“I’m going to a funeral this weekend,” said Perez, who was born and reared in South Los Angeles and whose childhood friend was killed.

In a sudden burst of frustration, she swept her hands at the young women of different nationalities surrounding her. “These are my friends. If I can get along with everyone else, why can’t they?”