UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 1 : THE PATH TO FURY : CHAPTER 6 : ‘My God, this is it. They’re going to burn down the whole neighborhood.’

Wednesday

On the afternoon that the King jury announced its acquittals, Jake Flukers telephoned his sons, ages 12 and 13, who lived with their mother in Lake View Terrace, where the King beating occurred. By now television news bulletins and denunciations of the verdicts, led by Mayor Bradley, were flaring.

The boys were taking the news hard.

“What do you feel like?” Flukers asked the younger one.

“I feel like going to get a gun,” the boy said.

“For what?”

“To go kill all those white folks.”

“You can’t kill all white folks,” Flukers said. “That boy you play basketball with, he’s white.”

He got in his car, headed out to the Valley and picked the boys up for a drive. They stopped to buy sodas at a store near the corner where King was beaten. They watched a gathering throng of protesters.

Flukers saw the boys had to get something out of their system. They had to scream, let the rage out. So he let them join the protesters, carrying signs, for a little while.

In Southwest Los Angeles, Cletus and Marcus, twice as old as the Flukers boys, were going to get their rage out, too. Somebody was going to pay. Three hours after the verdict, an hour before sundown, they left Cletus’ house and headed down the street to the RTD stop, where Marcus could catch the bus home.

That was when they saw all the people loaded down with loot taken from a neighborhood store. The young men went in and did the same.

Except it didn’t feel right. They didn’t feel satisfied. The act of taking was not an act of retribution. Something had to be destroyed. They had to strike back. If only we had a car, they thought. We could hit Westwood, somewhere like that. As it was, they walked to a store on 67th Street and West Boulevard in the Hyde Park district near Inglewood. They found four Latino friends. Marcus kicked in the door of the store.

“I’ve got a dangerous foot,” he says with a grin.

They loaded themselves down with what they could carry--canned goods, beer and food--and headed back to their neighborhood. The Latino guys went their way, Cletus and Marcus went theirs. But once home, they started worrying. Had they left fingerprints? Had they been caught on tape by a security camera?

They had to go back.

From a shelf, Cletus pulled down oil that he kept for kerosene lamps. They poured it into a 40-ounce beer bottle and used a rag for a wick.

When they got to the store, looters were still cleaning it out. The men yelled a warning, waited until the store was empty and threw the bottle against the wall. Poof! The bottle exploded into fire. That felt like something.

Farther south, at 126th Street and Avalon, Nettie Lewis and other staff members at the View Heights Convalescent Hospital quickly urged supervisors to cut short their meetings with patients’ families before things got worse.

Lewis raced her Cadillac toward East 89th Street. On Avalon, crowds were gathering. People were shouting, their faces angry. At Imperial Highway, someone had torched a fast-food chicken restaurant. Others were hurling bottles and other missiles. As she drove, the unruly crowds seemed to fade, only to be replaced by a pandemonium of people rushing to loot stores.

Everybody was running--down sidewalks, into the street, dodging cars and each other. People were smashing windows or trying to pry apart the bars of stores that had already shut down. Small fires burst out.

Concentrate on the road , she told herself. A man threw himself in her path. She missed him. As the street got clogged with people, she looked for a side street, wound up on a dead-end, made a furious U-turn and got home, crying. Her family was all right, watching the riot unfold on TV--the truck driver being dragged from his car and beaten nearly to death at Normandie and Florence, the helicopter shots of businesses afire, the station anchors astonished.

Oblivious to the verdict, Basiliso Merino had taken his daughter to enroll in Holy Communion classes at St. Raphael Church on West 70th Street that afternoon. Sign up and get out, a church worker said brusquely. It’s ugly. Merino had no idea what he meant, not until he began driving. Black youths were stoning cars.

At home he could see the first columns of smoke rising on Florence Avenue, just five or six blocks away. As dusk approached, even his normally quiet side-street descended into chaos. Black and Latino neighbors were returning with carloads of looted goods. Children rode stolen bicycles, women carried bags filled with shoes. Some neighbors tried to sell Merino the stolen merchandise.

Once night fell, Merino’s family retreated to the safety of the living room, watching the fires from behind security bars over the windows. About midnight, a group of men and women arrived to loot the liquor store across the street. One man seemed to be pouring gasoline.

“My God, this is it,” Merino thought. “They’re going to burn down the whole neighborhood!”

After a late working lunch with his boss at the Pacific Dining Car near downtown, Kerman Maddox called his office to make sure an employee had remembered to deliver an important document.

Teri Martin answered the phone. Her voice shook.

“Teri, did you call the printer?” Maddox asked.

“Kerman, have you heard?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t believe it!” she said. “I can’t believe it. The verdict came back. All four officers not guilty!”

Maddox, a former police liaison to Mayor Bradley who now ran the political outreach committee of the influential First A.M.E. Church, was close enough to the King beating to have launched an unsuccessful recall campaign against Police Chief Gates. But the news caught him unprepared.

“Now, Teri, don’t play games with me, dammit,” he said.

“No! I’m serious!” she said.

Maddox was stunned. He hung up the phone and stood in silent disbelief. He rushed back to his office in the lobbying firm of Winner, Bragg & Associates, picked up his briefcase and headed for the church, furious. Even Maddox--a man devoted to rational process, a man who ran for City Council--wanted to do something destructive, at least to vent his frustration.

He didn’t. A public meeting had already been planned at the church. Had verdicts of guilt been returned, it would have been a celebration. Now it would be a desperate effort to keep the city from exploding.

“Get out!” said the voice on the telephone. It was 6:30 p.m. Myung Lee was inside her doughnut shop at Florence and Figueroa. On the phone was another Korean merchant several blocks east, at Florence and Normandie, where the truck driver had been beaten bloody.

Lee locked the doors. By 7, she climbed into her car and sped home, heading north on the Harbor Freeway as the smoke from the first fires billowed to the west.

William Hong had fled his liquor store, too. In the confusing overlay of TV pictures--the cameras shifted from South Los Angeles to Parker Center to Compton in an ever-widening circle of fiery destruction--Lee at home in North Hollywood and Hong at home in Simi Valley found it impossible to tell whether their stores had survived.

Leticia had been caught in traffic during the first outburst of rioting and had rushed to her apartment, next to Hong’s liquor store. She called her roommate, Anna, at work in Santa Ana. Get back here! she insisted.

By the time Anna made it home, people were looting Hong’s store. They were breaking the windows in the doughnut shop, busting into the video store where Leticia had rented a tape hours before.

Most of the women in the apartment building joined in. Why not? they figured. Everyone else was doing it.

Leticia decided to go inside Hong’s store. It was muddy and slippery. It was crazy. Everybody was pushing and shoving. “We kept on running into the black people,” she said. “We would say in English, ‘Excuse me, excuse me.’ ”

Throughout South Los Angeles, poor Latino residents joined their black neighbors in looting the hundreds of liquor stores and discount clothing outlets that lined Florence, Figueroa, Slauson and other thoroughfares.

At the corner of Slauson and Vermont, hundreds of people ransacked the Indoor Swap Meet. Pregnant women emerged carrying boxes of diapers and baby food. It was clear: The protest over police abuse had become a poverty riot. Latino residents who had barely heard of Rodney King helped bend back iron security bars so they could ransack at will.

Many of the apartment residents near Florence and Figueroa took milk, butter and other food. Leticia, who has no children, did not.

“We told ourselves we were taking things because we were needy. Because we were poor. But when we got home and saw what we had taken, there was only beer,” she said.

She drank so much “free” beer she got drunk and went to sleep.

Anna locked herself inside the apartment, until a neighbor whose window faces the mini-mall came to warn them that a group of black men--led by a neighbor they knew only as Mike--was about to torch Hong’s liquor store and the other Asian-owned storefronts. They held crude torches made of sticks.

“They were thinking of every excuse they could to burn the building,” Anna said. “ ‘This Korean cheated us.’ ‘This other Korean was mean to us.’ ”

Anna pleaded with them not to burn the building. A fire, she argued, would almost certainly spread to her apartment building. “I said, ‘Go somewhere else. You’ll burn my house down. There’s families with children living next door.’ ”

The discussion lasted about 20 minutes. Mike knew Anna; she was cool. He agreed not to torch Hong’s store. The mob set fire to a grocery across the street instead.

And Wednesday night bled into Thursday morning.

Thursday

William Hong couldn’t sleep. At 4 a.m., he left his home in darkness to arrive at his store just before dawn. From the freeway, he could see fires glowing across South Los Angeles. At Florence and Figueroa, he saw that several businesses had been razed. Kitty-corner from his own business, a black-owned grocery store had been burned to the ground. In his store, the windows had been smashed, iron security bars ripped out, but nothing had been charred.

By late Thursday morning, as looters continued to empty the video store in the mini-mall, Hong was trying to salvage what merchandise he could. With his mother, father and brother, he packed up dozens of cans and bottles of beer and liquor. He discovered that all the money orders in the back were gone--selling money orders to Latino immigrants had been a big part of his business.

Los Angeles woke up to a continuing nightmare of looting and burning. Who could explain it? In front of her primarily Latino students at Elysian Heights Elementary school near Dodger Stadium, Onamia Bryant tried.

She used dog and snail puppets.

“This is the story of a little dog named Fluffy,” she began. Fluffy was a nice dog, but he loved to bother others, including the snail. Eventually the snail got tired of Fluffy, and asked a teacher what to do about it.

After the story, she had the children talk about what happened Wednesday night. Some said that black people must be bad to have turned to violence in the streets.

“No,” Bryant said. “It’s like Fluffy. He’s not always bad. He just doesn’t always know how how to act.” Remember, she said, it wasn’t just black people doing bad things. There were whites and Latinos, too. And there were also people trying to help others.

Art Washington, the black, middle-aged owner of J.C. Pest Control, was wondering where the help was going to come from.

Like Hong, Washington had made a nervous 4 a.m. drive to his business in a mini-mall at Western and 20th, the place he had assumed was far enough north of South Los Angeles to be safe.

He phoned his wife, Georgia.

“They got in,” he said. The computer was gone. The windows were broken. Most of the office furniture remained. There were no fires.

After daybreak, though, it started again. The athletic shoe store next to Washington’s shop became a magnet for young looters.

He watched them stream into the shoe store, up to 200 at one point. Kids! On the other side of 20th Street, dozens of spectators lounged at a 24-hour taco stand. There were no police. Any minute, he thought, they’re going to try to burn down his side of the block.

Finally, at 11:30 a.m., a dozen police officers--having fought a guerrilla war with looters a block north at Western and Washington, where three other mini-malls had been under siege--made their way to Washington’s and pushed the looters back to the other side of the street.

The cops stood in the parking lot. From the taco stand, looters threw rocks and shards of glass.

Washington stood in front of his store, watching the standoff.

And then he lost control.

He grabbed a hammer, and walked across the street into the faces of the looters, screaming at them hysterically.

“I worked for that!” he shouted. “Not you ! Don’t burn down none of my business! I worked too hard for this! It’s not right . It’s not right! It’s not right what y’all do! I came from the ghetto, too, like you! You call this black power?”

Nobody in the crowd responded. They looked at Washington as if he were crazy. Georgia, by now at the store, had trailed after him, knowing her husband’s temper. She led him back inside.

Kerman Maddox stopped by First A.M.E. Church, then rushed to KGFJ, where he worked part-time as a broadcaster. The radio station once had a star disc jockey named “Magnificent Montague,” who coined the slogan “Burn, Baby, Burn” that inadvertently became the battle cry of the Watts riots. On the way over, Maddox witnessed more of the riots of 1992. At Jefferson and Western, people shouted “Let’s rush Boys!” and a crowd of 50 to 75 people suddenly ran into the Boys Market and cleared the shelves. Men, women and kids were taking dog food, toilet paper, food.

He took the Santa Monica Freeway west to La Brea and turned north. A gas station was on fire. All over La Brea people were running. Trash cans were on fire, businesses in flames. The riots were moving west and north.

Maddox went on the air, but with a feeling of bitter irony. Here he was, a man with solid links to community and church and the political Establishment, the institutions that made the world work--here he was, on the radio, telling people, to stay cool, to remain calm. And outside, glowing embers were drifting toward the palm trees outside the station’s building--palm trees like the ones rampaging protesters had burned the night before along the Hollywood Freeway at the Civic Center, those stately symbols of a Los Angeles.

“I don’t know how much longer we’ll be on the air,” he said, “because directly across the street from us, there is a fire raging out of control.”

Maddox could hear explosions coming from the inferno. Fire trucks roared up. The city was burning. Electrical power was out in parts of town. People were dying in the streets. The National Guard was on the way.

This wasn’t America, Maddox thought. This was like the Middle East.

Further up La Brea, near 6th Street--far from the districts where people were accustomed to street violence, Nancy Silverton was scared. Almost directly across the street from her tony restaurant, Campanile, the Radio Shack had been broken into around 4 p.m. Silverton and her husband, Mike Peel, watched looters stream in and out with electronic equipment in tow.

The looters who broke the window and went in first were black. The next waves were not what she expected. It wasn’t just that they were white. It was what they were driving--two or three BMWs, a white Cadillac, a Jeep, a school bus. A school bus? The bus driver stopped, got out, grabbed a few things, loaded them onto the bus and took off.

Just up the street, at La Brea and Beverly, Samy’s Camera was broken into about the same time. Six or seven black men shot at the lock with what sounded like an automatic weapon, but the looters who followed were mostly white kids. One guy was driving a Lexus. One kid was wearing a yarmulke. Finally, someone torched the building.

The looting no longer was a civil rights issue, Silverton decided. It was a free-for-all.

By 11 this night, a thousand structure fires would be burning in Los Angeles, two dozen people would be dead, nearly 600 would be injured and damage would be estimated at $200 million.

And it would all be only half over.

From their front porch in South-Central Los Angeles, Nettie Lewis’ family could look out on the horizon at flames everywhere.

With helicopters overhead and sporadic gunfire accompanying the sirens, the noise was so fierce, so relentless, that Lewis’ 3-year-old granddaughter would fall asleep this night with her hands pressed against her ears.

Lewis and her daughter ventured out to pick up a friend at a hospital. As they drove through the crowds, they saw looters prying gates from storefronts. They spotted police cars amid the mayhem and decided to follow them for protection. But when the patrol cars took off in another direction, the women were left to wend their way through the destruction. As the crowds began throwing debris, the women, along with other drivers, started racing ahead to avoid bottles and stones.

“If the light goes slow to red, then punch the gas pedal to 90, and I’ll pay the ticket later,” Lewis told her daughter.

Suddenly, a Molotov cocktail struck a store near them, showering their car with glass. That was enough. They turned around and went home.

In Simi Valley, Steve and Leslie Frank debated whether to let their 12-year-old twins, Amy and Emily, watch the constant barrage of televised violence. Leslie left the TV on.

“I think they’re old enough to look at this and see it as part of their world,” she said. “After all, they’re going to inherit these problems.”

But the girls were confused. And their parents wondered how to explain it. How do you explain to them that somebody is stealing a TV from Fedco because of the jury’s decision, Steve Frank wondered. If you find it difficult to explain to an adult, how do you explain it to your kids?

They tried to tell the children that no matter how frustrated you are, violence and destruction do not solve things--something like the point of Onamia Bryant’s story about Fluffy and the snail.

And the Franks defended the jury’s decision.

“Looters and criminals should have no excuses made for them,” said Steve Frank. “These people who are out there blaming it on Reagan?. . . Now they have to take responsibilities for themselves. And they don’t like it. They’re trying to blame someone else for their problems.”

In South Los Angeles, Laura Price tried to explain the terror to two teen-age nephews, who had come to stay with her because their home was in the midst of riots.

Society has always had a dominant group, Price told them, one which for some reason feels superior. It wasn’t that Rodney King was beaten for doing something bad, she said. It was that white cops had caught him in a white neighborhood. “I also told them, no matter what white people are saying, we are not a lesser race. Behind every successful white man there’s a black man. I’m from the South, and I’ve seen them take blacks’ ideas and claim it for themselves, whether it’s music or literature.”

There were moments, watching the violence on television, when Price thought that this time, if there was to be looting and burning, let it be in white communities. Not hers.

“A small part of me felt like, ‘Yeah, hit that one.’ When I realized it had gotten to the San Fernando Valley, I said, ‘Yes! Don’t just tear up our neighborhood. Go out there where people have money to fix it.’ Then I realized what I was feeling, and I reprimanded myself.”

Richard Breen, the Hollywood Hills resident who owned the trucking company in South-Central Los Angeles, was an ex-hippie. He had seen anti-war riots outside the Pentagon. But they paled in comparison with this.

With a handful of employees, he had guarded his six-acre, fenced-in trucking compound on the first night, and they figured they had escaped disaster. But on Thursday afternoon, the phone rang at Breen’s home. The place is falling apart, a worker said. “We have to evacuate. There’re 300 people on the streets rioting.”

Once again, Breen sped back to South Central. Rioters were gathered in front of the main entrance to his business.

After sneaking in through the back, Breen discovered that his employees were trapped in the compound. From the roof of his administrative building, he could see cars speeding along Hooper with refrigerators and sofas sticking out of their trunks. Hundreds of looters were running past the building from several nearby stores that had been set ablaze.

“Their eyes are empty because they have no hope,” Breen thought of the looters. “People with empty eyes will do anything.”

He armed his employees with handguns and prepared for the worst.

Someone rammed a car into a paper company across the street. The vehicle was in flames. Fearing that a fire at the paper company could wipe out the entire block, including his business, Breen called the Fire Department. “They told me, ‘You’re on your own. There’s nothing we can do to help you.’ The fires were going 360 degrees around my building.’ ” Eventually, the car fire died. Breen settled in for another sleepless night, on guard.

Fred Williams, the youth worker who had predicted there would be no riot, was wrong. And exhausted. He had stayed up all night and into the morning, dreading what he heard and saw. Gang members were bragging about the number of gun stores and pawn shops they had busted into to bolster their arms stock. Looters took what they thought had been taken from them.

“These young people are so angry it’s scary,” he said Thursday afternoon.

The problems that loomed now for the housing project residents in South Los Angeles were awesome: no electricity, no welfare checks, no markets. “They’re just at the wire. They would rather not have anything, to have it all burn down, than to take another abuse from this system. It’s one of the most devastating things I’ve seen. Last night I talked to hundreds of brothers, and they’re saying--some with tears in their eyes--’Mr. Fred, we just ain’t gonna take it.’ I talked to a man in his late 40s. He was looting out of a Boys Market. He said, ‘Mr. Fred, I lost my job nine months ago, then I lost my house. You damn right I’m looting.’ A woman told me: ‘We been out of work, nobody in my family’s worked in 10 years. We been on AFDC. You damn right I’m looting.’ ”

Friday

Finally, the National Guard arrived. By midday, the first thousand were in place as the riot’s death toll rose past the 34 recorded in the week-long Watts disturbances of 1965.

Still, a slight sense of stability set in.

When Myung Lee returned to her doughnut shop on Friday--she had been too scared to come back Thursday--she found it looted, the plate glass windows shattered. The cash register was gone. Not a single doughnut was left.

All those hours of work, she asked herself. For what? It was all gone now. She stood in a corner of the mini-mall and cried. “I hate this business . . .. I hate it!”

A few minutes later, her spirits lifted. A few Latino residents of the neighborhood, including Leticia and Anna, arrived with brooms and trash bags to help clean up the stores in the mall. Neither Lee nor her neighbor, William Hong, realized they were the same people who had done the looting two nights before.

Leticia felt guilty.

“This was a black protest, and all the Latinos got involved. It went from a protest to vandalism,” she said. “For what? What did we have to do with this Rodney King?”

A couple of the women had cuts and scratches on their wrists and arms, injuries suffered during the looting. In the rush to escape from the store, one had fallen down on the broken glass.

Anna apologized to Hong for having looted his liquor store.

“Chino, I was one of the people who took things from your store,” she said. “I took 10 six-packs. I’m sorry, Chino. I’ll pay you for the beer if you want.” No, Hong said, he didn’t want the money. He was grateful to Anna for saving the building from fire. He and Anna exchanged phone numbers, and Anna agreed to call him at home if somebody again tried to burn the store.

Later, the National Guard arrived at the intersection. Three soldiers took up positions in front of the video store. They got bored quickly. The women in the apartment complex gave them water and cooked quesadillas . One guardsman, from Tulare in the San Joaquin Valley, politely knocked on Anna and Leticia’s door. His six-foot frame barely fit into the tiny apartment. The soldier asked for another glass of water. Anna was more than happy to oblige.

“Since the National Guard is here, we feel better,” she said. “We’re against violence.”

The Death and Destruction Spreads

The section hardest hit in the Watts riot bore the brunt of the recent violence as well. But the toll in lives and property was much greater in 1992 as the violence spread across the region. Surveying the Damage

Watts ’92 Rioting Deaths 34 58 Injuries 1,032 2,383 Civilians 773 2,314 Firefighters 136 3 LAPD 90 Guardsmen 10 66* Others 23 Arrests 3,952 17,000 Fire calls 600 10,000 Property Damage $183 mil. $785 mil. Days of rioting 6 3

*66 LAPD, guardsmen and members of outside law enforcement agencies were injured. Individual breakdown unavailable. No CHP officers reported injured.

On Riot Duty

Watts ’92 Rioting LAPD officers 934 5,000 Guardsmen 13,900 9,975 Federal troops -- 3,313 Other agencies 719 1,950 CHP 60 2,323 Total: 16,487 20,238