Fear, Distrust Linger Long After Riot Fires Die Down : Unrest: Many feel insecure, and uneasy looks are still exchanged between people of different races.

The raging fires have long been extinguished, but fear still engulfs the daily lives of untold numbers of Los Angeles residents, one month after the worst civil unrest in a century ripped through city streets.

Residents and merchants from Venice to Koreatown to South Los Angeles say that the uncontrollable violence that began April 29 and ended three days later has so rocked their sense of security that they have altered their lives and personal dealings with strangers in ways both dramatic and routine.

Some feel their home life around the riot flash points has been destroyed, and they are moving out. A Latino man in the Pico-Union district no longer feels safe venturing into black neighborhoods. Families hole up inside their homes after dark. Mindful of the brutal televised images of motorists under attack, the freewheeling Los Angeles driver is more likely to come to a rolling stop or slip through a red light.

Trust, for some, is a feeling that vanished one month ago with the plumes of smoke. Strangers of different races are often uneasy around each other. If trouble erupts, will the police show up?

“I’m looking over my shoulder now,” said Marc Rheinhold, whose Crenshaw Boulevard business was destroyed. “I don’t know if the guy in the car with the tinted windows is going to shoot me. I look straight ahead everywhere I go. I keep to myself.”

Sharon Ingram of Lynwood, a New York city native, said she feels the old jitters of a New York subway rider when she rides the Metro Rail Blue Line trolleys through South Los Angeles.

“Everyone is on edge now,” Ingram said. “No one knows who is upset over what.”

Anxiety is mounting for some of the hardest-hit riot victims--those who lost their homes, merchants whose businesses were destroyed and the unemployed--as May bills come due and losses are calculated. Despite spirited determination to rebuild, many are uncertain about the future and fear renewed violence.

“Right now, I can’t see a good future. Last month feels like yesterday to me,” said Byong K. Kim, who is continually haunted by the ash that blows into his house, which is next to his burned-out appliance warehouse. “Mr. Kim is here, but part of Mr. Kim has died.”

Fear has invaded the sanctity of homes in some riot areas, where some residents believe the only way to find peace is to move away.

For Roy and Laverne Walker, longtime South Los Angeles residents who live near the epicenter of the riot at Florence and Normandie avenues, life has been forever changed.

Roy Walker, a state police officer, always felt his neighborhood was dangerous, but wanted to stay in the community where he had grown up, where family members still live.

Now, however, Walker feels as if he, his wife and their 23-month-old daughter are living like prisoners. Laverne will not garden in the back yard when her husband is away. They avoid small neighborhood stores after dark and eat at restaurants outside the community.

“I don’t know whether we have changed or the community has changed, but after a riot starts at your doorstep, things will never be the same,” he said. “I’m fed up. I’ve lived in the city all my life, and it just isn’t worth it.”

Since the riot, the Walkers, who are black, have increased their efforts to find a new home in the suburbs--perhaps Lancaster, Canyon Country or even Simi Valley. “I don’t care,” he said.

Two weeks ago, Laverne Walker was incensed when a North Hollywood upholsterer failed to come to her home to install plastic slip covers on her dining room chairs.

“He asked where we lived, what were the cross streets,” Walker said. “He said he would be over, but I never heard from him again.”

Across town in Venice, near the Oakwood public housing projects, the wrath of rioters turned personal as looters and arsonists attacked homes, reflecting tensions over gentrification, which has seen affluent Anglos pushing out blacks and Latinos from the seaside neighborhood.

Alan and Caren Smith, whose two-story rented condominium was looted and then firebombed by a mob of about 25, said their impression of the neighborhood has been turned upside down.

The Smiths, who are white, have since moved out, and so have some tenants of a nearby building that was also vandalized.

Although they had made great friends of their neighbors in the year they lived in Venice, Caren Smith said she is afraid to go back to the same street they were forced to flee.

“It’s not that they hate me,” she said of those who destroyed her house. “They don’t know me. They hate what I stand for.”

Paula Zimmer, 27, and her roommate will not return to the spacious Venice house they rented because after the looting, Zimmer’s sense of security cannot be restored.

“It was something we didn’t want to be worried about happening again,” she said. “After we moved we both thought, maybe we should have stayed there. But I just don’t think I’d feel safe.”

Business owners grapple not only with the decision of whether to rebuild in the same neighborhood, but as the weeks wear on, they are struggling to cope with the stress of crumbled finances.

“I have a business that burned down, two houses I can’t afford and my car won’t pass the smog check. What else can go wrong?” lamented Rheinhold, who owned a prosthetic business. “I’ve just been in automatic for the past month. I take on the most immediate problem and then move on to the next one.”

Jay Lee, 40, however, is beginning to feel paralyzed by the uncertainty in his life. As he gulped coffee, gobbled a doughnut and smoked, he said he has been in a daze since his swap meet burned down at 7th and Union avenues. He fears he is on the brink of joining the ranks of poor people.

He has spent days filling out government loan applications, but the money has not yet come through. His car payment and rent are due. He had depleted his savings before the riot to stock the store. He feeds his family with charitable food baskets.

“We are not poor people, we are a business family. We had a regular income,” Lee said. “Now, I don’t know what to do. What I need is money right away. I have to worry about my payments. But when I think too much, I get nervous.”

He is determined to reopen his business, but this time it will be in Bakersfield, Barstow, maybe Riverside. He feels betrayed by the community that he invested in.

“I hate to be on the street in Los Angeles anymore,” Lee said. “I thought my customers were my friends. But they did this to me. Now I would hate to see them.”

Although the emergency siege is over and the wailing sirens have quieted, life for those in hard-hit riot zones has become a routine of inconvenience. In the days after the riot, residents scrambled to find a new store, bank and gas station--awe-struck by the devastation.

Now, simple tasks such as getting to the grocery store or mailing a letter take longer because the neighborhood market and post office are in ruins. Prices are higher at many small stores as merchants--some vengeful because their stores were looted--try and recoup losses.

“My attitude has changed. The people who looted were my customers,” said Sivakaran Kanagaratnam, 26, co-owner of a Koreatown convenience store. “I used to be 20% above wholesale. Now I am 50%.”

Other routines--an evening stroll, children’s playtime, a trip to the self-service laundry--have been disrupted because of fear of isolated outbreaks of violence. Some have imposed curfews on themselves, avoiding streets after dark.

Maria Gibson of Venice shuns walks on the beach. Her neighbors no longer linger on the sidewalk talking after dusk.

“There’s been a whole lot of change,” Gibson said. You don’t see people on the street anymore. They’re all afraid to come out. You don’t get to go anywhere.”

Willie Carter, 81, who lives near the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts, knew that the legacy of the riots would continue to the next generation when his 4-year-old great-granddaughter tugged on his pant leg the other day and asked: “Is there going to be any more shooting, Grandpa?”

“These kids haven’t forgotten it,” he said, adding that they do not venture beyond the front yard to play. “I don’t think they will ever forget it.”

After being pummeled for a month with news about how Latinos, blacks, Koreans and Anglos looted each other’s businesses and attacked each other on the street, uneasiness seems to have settled over the most banal of exchanges between people of different races.

Friendly conversation between strangers can at times feel awkward. At best, passersby ignore each other. At worst, they shout epithets.

Tom Wright of Venice, a black 40-year-old actor, said that since the riots his white wife “takes more notice of people.

“And me being black and middle class, I catch a lot of hostility wherever I go,” Wright said. “There’s this pressure. Everyone’s checking everyone out. Are you one of them? Do you fit in? I get that vibe whenever I go someplace, and I don’t like it. I am middle class, and I am caught right in the middle, to be frank. I get ‘the scan’ from black people, and white people as well.”

Joyce de la Cruz, 47, said that she tries to be sensitive to the feelings of blacks she encounters, then worries that she overcompensates in dispensing niceties.

“When I meet a black person, I’m very careful on how I come on,” De la Cruz said. “I know they feel they have been suppressed. I don’t want them to see me and say ‘There’s another whitey.’ ”

Others have seized the heightened sensitivity to racial differences to reach out.

Taffy Shin, a Korean-American whose family operates a fish market in the Crenshaw district, said they have patched up the damage to their little market and business is humming again. Slowly, their regular black customers returned when the shop reopened after being closed for a week.

“Before, a customer would come in and I’d say ‘Hi, can I take your order,’ ” said Shin. “But now we talk more. We try to get a better conversation going.”

Not far away, Thomas Powe still has a “black owned” sign prominently displayed in the window of his manicure shop--a handwritten symbol of protection that he hopes will deflect community rage from his business.

He believes that race relations eroded swiftly in the last month.

“If anything, people’s attitudes are worse,” Powe said. “Even though we now know that everyone was involved in the looting--whites, Latinos and Asians--it all gets blamed on the black folks.”

Salvadoran immigrant Maria Flores, who takes the bus to house-cleaning jobs on the West Side, said she can sometime feel eyes staring at her and fears that blacks will assault her because of her race.

“I know now that in America people can beat you because of racism,” she said.

Times staff writers John Mitchell, Carla Rivera, Bettina Boxall and Marc Lacey contributed to this story.