Chaos and Frustration at Florence and Normandie : Rioting: Officers tell of heroic deeds and a retreat, and of their wait for orders to return to the scene.

Beyond the range of the television cameras that fixed on truck driver Reginald O. Denny--lying bloodied, helpless and alone at the crossing of Normandie and Florence avenues--the officers of the LAPD’s 77th Street Division waged a chaotic, unseen war on the night the riots first swept Los Angeles.

While the Police Department’s command structure collapsed around them, seemingly paralyzed by the escalating violence, some officers dodged sniper fire and went head-to-head with brick-wielding mobs. Others, even after being ordered by higher-ups to retreat for their own protection, headed back into the storm of shattering glass and menacing taunts, rescuing injured motorists caught in one of the riots’ flash points.

A small band of detectives bravely tried to save Denny but was forced back by gunfire and rioters emboldened by their rage and numbers.

In interviews with The Times, 15 officers from 77th Street who were on the front lines that balmy evening of April 29th have provided new insights into the heroics of street cops who stormed into the fray with all the headstrong pride of the department’s last 40 years, and came out on the other side bowed and diminished.

They also have offered new details of the mistakes they say their superiors made in preparing for the possibility of violence after the Rodney G. King verdicts--and the brass’s failure to react swiftly and cohesively once the unrest erupted. The disturbances flared into the Los Angeles Police Department’s worst nightmare, a law enforcement Waterloo that has shaken the force to its core.

“We had a meltdown that night. Everything we believed in went out the window,” said Sgt. J. J. May, a veteran supervisor who drove through a gantlet of bottle-throwing rioters at Normandie and Florence--after 77th Street officers had been ordered to withdraw to a command post about 30 blocks from the scene.

Although other disturbances flared at several South Los Angeles intersections at the same time, the actions--and inaction--of 77th Street’s commanders and line officers at Normandie and Florence loom large in investigations under way to determine whether the lack of effective police response allowed the riots to spread.

Capt. Paul Jefferson, the 77th Street Division commander, declined repeated requests for an interview. But in earlier statements to The Times, he supported the conduct of his line officers and defended field commander Lt. Michael Moulin’s decision to withdraw his forces from a South Los Angeles intersection that has become synonymous with the country’s worst urban riots in the past century.

In recent days, patrol officers have complained openly about their ordeal--angered by the failure of high-level department commanders to react more swiftly, frustrated by their own helplessness and outraged by what some describe as poor planning.

Several officers have said they received no specific training for the King verdicts in the weeks before the riots. “Nothing, no preparation at all,” said Renee Minnick, 27, a 4 1/2-year veteran who responded to the disturbance at Normandie and Florence. “They didn’t even talk about (the possibility) there may be protests. Nothing.”

Other officers said that a month ago, they were given a useful 15- to 30-minute training seminar in riot formation tactics from Sgt. James Brady, a crowd-control expert. That was all.

“The skirmish line was all we had,” said one P.M. watch officer who declined to be named. “At least it was something. But other than that, zero, zip.”

Slow to Plan

Officers say that it was not until King trial jurors started deliberating in late April on the fate of the four LAPD officers charged with the black motorist’s beating that commanders at 77th Street began giving hints of their post-verdict plans. According to Officer Kris Owen, on the Tuesday before the verdict, 77th Street Capt. Robert Hansohn told officers in the afternoon roll call that he did not expect trouble after the verdicts but encouraged officers with a different opinion to speak up. Some did, including Owen.

“I said, ‘The people you’re getting your information from are the City Council or Neighborhood Watch,’ ” Owen recalled. “ ‘But the patrol cops feel that on the street, it’s very tense, and we’re being told by gang members that if the officers get off, there will be a riot.’ ”

Hansohn said he was concerned enough to cancel unnecessary days off for officers and was distressed that he had not earlier heard about the tensions on the street from other members of the brass.

“Our intelligence about this whole situation was not good--management’s, I should say,” Hansohn maintained. “The officers had more insight than we did, and that concerns me. But why we didn’t pick this up at more than one roll call also concerns me.”

Minutes before the verdicts, Lt. Moulin, an erect, ruddy-faced veteran with a no-nonsense demeanor and a reputation--according to one officer--for “not tolerating any B.S.,” ordered all day watch officers to remain in the field past the end of their shift in the event of violence, officers said.

At 2:30 p.m., according to Sgt. May, Moulin’s roll call was interrupted by the verdicts. He warned the 30 officers who were present that if disorders flared up, they were to regroup and form a command post at 54th Street and Arlington Avenue, inside a secure, cinderblock-walled RTD bus terminal.

As Moulin spoke, two television sets in the roll call room carried the broadcast live from the Simi Valley courthouse. The roll call room buzzed with murmurs of surprise as the foreman read the verdicts.

“Keep it down,” Moulin barked.

Out on Vermont Avenue, Officers Lisa Phillips and Dan Nee--both white--paused from their foot patrol in front of Jesse’s TV Shop, a black-owned business that later burned to the ground. They stood inside the shop, watching with a group of black residents they knew from their foot beat.

As the not guilty verdicts were read, Phillips sensed that she and Nee were no longer welcome. “Right then and there, I saw it in a couple people’s eyes,” Phillips recalled. “I felt it was time to go to our car.”

Several blocks away, Officer Kevin Robinson and his partner, Officer David Brown, were trying to comfort an emotionally unstable woman who was so dismayed by the King verdict that she threatened to swallow a bottle of pills. Robinson and Brown persuaded her to give up the bottle and spend the rest of the day under the care of a friend.

“I told her, yeah, it hurts,” said Robinson, a soft-spoken black officer with 7 1/2 years on the force. “It hurts a lot of people, but you can’t kill yourself over this.”

Back at the station, Moulin tried to focus his officers’ attention on their post-verdict conduct. It was not easy. “The guys were in shock. Everyone expected guilty verdicts,” said May.

Sgt. Nick Titiraga, an anti-gang supervisor who attended the roll call, heard Moulin tell officers that if they “get into a situation where a crowd starts to form, they should get other units there and announce your Code 6 (police shorthand for identifying location) with lots of people.”

Within an hour of his roll call, Moulin had numerous Code 6 calls at Normandie and Florence--long before television viewers would witness the attack on truck driver Denny.

About 4:30 p.m., Owen and partner Steve Zaby heard the first “415”--a disturbance call. Six black men were reportedly smashing car windows with baseball bats. As Owen’s squad car neared Florence and 71st, the cruiser was hit by a volley of bricks and rocks. He could see a group of officers attending an injured white driver who had been pulled from his Volvo.

Owen could also see the crowd, 150 strong, gesturing and shouting on the sidewalk a block away. Over his “rover” portable radio, he heard a staccato police helicopter transmission. A family had been similarly attacked and beaten in their car near Florence and Normandie. He and Zaby raced to the scene and found a terrified Latino couple with a 1-year-old child. Their faces were bloody, cut by broken glass. Owen and Zaby hustled the family back to the squad car and drove off to Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital.

More officers responded. Sirens drowned out the noise of the mob as each new car pulled up. Officer Perry Alvarez was among several patrolmen who vaulted over a row of fences and chased down a 16-year-old youth who was allegedly throwing rocks at the arriving units. Kicking and wrestling with the officers, the squirming suspect was hogtied.

Mother Protested

Some neighbors later complained that the youth’s treatment helped ignite the mob’s fury. The youth’s mother was among the roiling crowd who surrounded Alvarez and other officers as they hauled the teen-ager toward a waiting police car. “Don’t take my baby, that’s my son,” she wailed.

Alvarez says no excessive force was used on the youth--and that officers were careful not to use their batons. The teen-ager was later released at the scene because “there was so much confusion, I don’t think anyone actually saw him throwing rocks.”

And by that point, the crowd was already wild, Alvarez says. One irate man approached him, pulled down his pants, grabbed his genitals and cursed him, the officer recalled. “It was mass confusion,” Alvarez said. “They called us names, everything in the book. If you told them to step back, they’d say, ‘What are you going to do, Rodney King me?’ ”

While some officers tried to arrest the most dangerous combatants, others formed a ragged skirmish line, trying to press the crowd back. The black officers were singled out for the most vehement abuse. Officer Rashad Sharif, 24, a slender, three-year black police veteran, was kicked, struck and spat on.

“You sell-out! You sell-out! Why are you working for a white man?” one man taunted.

Robinson tried to maintain his composure amid the taunts. “Whose side are you on?” outraged voices screamed. “Uncle Tom! . . . King beater! . . . Oreo! . . . We’re going to get you!”

Adrenaline coursed inside him. Robinson felt his muscles grow taut. “I felt cold, like chills, like a headache,” he recalls. He recognized several gang members gesturing in the crowd. They knew him too. Several took up a chilling chant: “It’s Uzi time!”

In an earlier interview with The Times, Moulin said he responded to frantic reports from officers at the scene by leading a contingent of 25 officers from the station to Normandie and Florence. At 5:43 p.m., now on the scene, Moulin shouted into his radio: “I want everybody out of here. Florence and Normandie. Everybody, get out! Now!”

Sometime in the next few minutes, shortly after the officers had driven from the scene, a lone patrol car veered up through Normandie and Florence. Inside were Officers Phillips and Nee, who on their own initiative answered a report of an assault with a deadly weapon.

They saw a small gray car in the middle of the intersection. Its windows were gone. Inside, a Korean woman lay unconscious, slumped down in the driver’s seat. As bottles flew around them, Phillips held the mob back with her pistol while Nee ran to the car, cradled the woman in his arms and retreated. A rock smashed into the back of his knees and he fell. He made it to the squad car and thrust the woman into the back seat. As they drove off, a brick shattered their rear window, raining shards of glass over all of them.

“I thought she was dead,” Phillips recalled. They drove on to Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, where they discovered that the woman was only unconscious, though badly injured. “We want people to know that the 77th Street officers didn’t abandon them,” Nee said later. “All anybody wanted to do was to go back out there.”

A few minutes later, after Nee and Phillips left, two more squad cars screeched into the intersection. Inside were May and Titiraga, along with a third officer, Tom Matthews. May drove toward Normandie and Florence because “my concern was that we didn’t have any officers near the intersection, and a number of help calls had come out. And somebody had to assess the situation there.”

Whipping around Florence, May and Titiraga aimed their car at a mob of 200 rioters swarming into Tom’s Liquors. Titiraga brandished his 9-millimeter pistol. The crowd scattered as the car neared them. Full bottles of liquor bounced off the roof. One bottle came so close to Titiraga’s head he could identify the label: “Kessler.”

Pulling off, the two sergeants argued. May wanted to stay. Titiraga said they had no choice but to obey the pullout order. “I said this is utter B.S. We can’t leave now!” May recalls. But after a second hellbent spin through they human gantlet, they, too, drove off.

A Last Attempt

As Reginald Denny lay stunned and bloodied after being dragged from his cement truck, 77th Street officers made their last attempt to get to the intersection. Detective Lt. Bruce Hagerty, who had taken temporary command of the 77th Street station after most of the division’s officers had regrouped at the command post, was stunned as he watched Denny repeatedly pummeled over live television.

With no evidence of any police units in sight, Hagerty ordered the only unit at his command, an undercover car loaded with four plainclothes detectives, to attempt a rescue. “I had 12 uniformed officers inside the station, but no cars to send them in,” Hagerty anguished later.

The undercover car got close to Normandie and Florence, but was forced to turn back. Sniper fire near the intersection was thick, Hagerty said. And the streets were clogged with rioters and abandoned cars.

“For their safety, they had to get out of there,” Hagerty said of the four detectives. “I felt incredibly frustrated. I felt helpless because we couldn’t get to that situation.”

The command post at 54th and Arlington was almost as chaotic, say officers who pulled up in the first few minutes after Moulin ordered the withdrawal. Witnesses say Moulin tried to project a calm and decisive demeanor, but seemed “incredibly stressed underneath.” May and Titiraga watched him bark orders into his rover radio while trying to fend away officers desperate to return to Normandie and Florence.

May and Titiraga were among them. “I said, ‘Mike, we came back through there, they’re looting the liquor store,’ ” May recalled. “ ‘Let me take a couple of squads back there and take care of it. If I need more people, I promise I’ll ask you for it.’ ”

He said that Moulin responded: “No, we got to stay here, we’ve got Metro (the department’s specialized units) rolling. Metro’s trained for this.”

“So we sat back and waited for Metro.”

Moulin ordered the first officers on the scene to line up their cars in a tight formation and form into squads. May had each of them sign “Unusual Occurrence” cards--forms that the department uses to account for its officers during special and hazardous events.

An excruciating two-hour stretch of waiting began. “The command post turned into a a big black hole that sucked officers in and didn’t spit them out,” recalled 77th Street Sgt. Theresa Tatreau.

Officers sat on their squad car hoods and inside their vehicles, watching Moulin for any hint of gearing up. Some sat in full riot gear, sweating under their white helmets and bulletproof vests. Others, who had responded to the riot scene so quickly that they had no time to don their helmets, waited in their summer uniforms.

Officer Renee Minnick, who with her partner, Officer Lisa Hutjens, had driven their cruiser behind Dan Nee and Lisa Phillips on their dangerous drive back into Normandie and Florence, walked around her squad car, counting dents. “Oh my God,” she said. “I can’t believe this.”

Some officers were listening to the riot calls that burst like machine gun fire over their communications channel. They shook their heads and cursed each time they realized they were unable to respond.

Their frustration mounted as they heard other units responding to riot calls inside the 77th Street Division. “There were units going in there who didn’t know the first thing about our division--when we should have been going in,” May said.

In one case that night, a unit from outside the 77th made the mistake of trying to drive through an active gang area that “we knew to avoid,” May said. “They took a lot of rocks and bottles that we would’ve driven around.”

Finally, about 8 p.m., commanders began sending 77th Street officers back into the field. Many ended up answering calls in other divisions--putting them in the same danger that outside units faced as they took assignments in unfamiliar 77th Street Division territory.

Officers returning from completed duties trudged into an RTD terminal building to pick up their new assignments. They were handed pink assignment slips and headed back out into the field.

Minnick was not sent out until 9:30 p.m. Her calls, she discovered, were often three-hour-old assignments “just to clear the queue.” Early that night, Minnick and Hutjens responded to a report of a liquor store being looted at 81st and Main streets. Pulling up to the scene, they found the store already stripped bare and engulfed in flames.

Command Changed

At another point, Minnick, Hutjens, Phillips and Nee were placed under the command of a sergeant from Parker Center “who didn’t even know how to use a rover.”

Later Phillips and Nee were assigned to “hold ground” at the corner of Vermont and Arlington, told to protect the corner from looting. The markets and motel at the intersection had already been hit.

Commanders shuttled in and out of the command post, rarely speaking to the troops. The first high-ranking officer on the scene after Moulin had arrived was Cmdr. Ronald Banks of the South Bureau. The next was Capt. Paul Jefferson, 77th Street’s commander.

For a while, they sat outside and kept their distance from the frustrated line officers. “They wouldn’t talk to us,” said one officer. “They sat over there by themselves and wouldn’t talk to us. And they damn near had a mutiny. I’ll tell you, a lot of officers were ready to go back to their cars and just go out.”

Later on, as they became organized, the commanders disappeared inside a guarded RTD building where central command offices were set up. They were seen rarely that first night, officers said. At one point, Chief Daryl F. Gates arrived in an unmarked burgundy-colored car. He, too, disappeared into the compound. Rumors soon swept the remaining contingent of patrol officers that the chief was furious.

Some said that an enraged Gates had knocked a coffee cup out a chastened subordinate’s hand. Others said that Gates himself had flung a full cup in his fury. In the end, it didn’t matter. The officers of 77th Street were grasping for something, some shred of evidence that the officers above them knew what they were doing.

Most of the line officers who regrouped at the command post that night say they harbor few hard feelings about Moulin’s initial decision to withdraw. Many felt his decision to pull out from Normandie and Florence that night was a wise one--at least at that chaotic moment.

But they are unable to understand why they were not quickly sent back into the fray--a complaint echoed by Gates, who has criticized Moulin and others for not regrouping and retaking the intersection.

“Mike made a decision because his concern was for the safety and welfare of the officers,” said May. “Well those officers are us. We understand that. But if his decision was so goddamn bad, and everybody wants to blame him for the escalation of the riot, then why didn’t these damn commanders who showed up at the RTD station an hour after we did, why didn’t they reverse his orders and send us out there to take that corner back?”

All that is now grist for the investigators.

No one at the station has seen Moulin since those early days of the riot. May recalls seeing him a few times in the dark days that followed that long, first night, catching a few glimpses of Moulin inside the command compound. He had the look of a man who knew he was headed for a fall.

“When I saw him, he was real quiet, real subdued,” May said. “I guess he knew what was coming.”