Denny Files Claim, Says City Failed to Protect Him : Riots: The truck driver, beaten in the early hours of the civil unrest, is expected to file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against L.A.

Truck driver Reginald O. Denny, whose televised beating came to symbolize the racial turmoil of the spring riots, filed a claim against the city on Tuesday, accusing the Los Angeles Police Department of failing to protect him.

The claim--which is expected to be rejected by the city attorney--is a first step toward an expected multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city on Denny’s behalf, said Eric Ferrer, his lawyer.

The 36-year-old trucker was pulled from his big-rig at Florence and Normandie avenues and severely beaten on April 29, two hours after the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of motorist Rodney G. King.

On Tuesday, Ferrer said his client never would have been attacked had Los Angeles police made a reasonable effort to secure the intersection before the violence got out of hand.

“By arriving and then withdrawing from Florence and Normandie, the police sent a message to the people in the streets that said, ‘You own the streets. We’re not going to come in here and do anything,’ ” Ferrer said.

The action came a day after civil rights attorneys filed claims against the city on behalf of nearly 1,800 other people who say they were injured or had property damaged during the violence.

Thursday is the deadline to file claims for damage or injuries that occurred on April 29, the first day of the riots. The claims are a necessary precursor to a lawsuit in the state courts.

The city’s lawyers contend that the city and its officials are immune from any liability resulting from the riots, based on a court ruling that barred claims from the 1965 Watts riots.

But Ferrer and other lawyers who were involved in the claims filed on Monday contend that the 1969 ruling does not apply to claims arising from racial discrimination.

The claim on Denny’s behalf faults the LAPD for being slow to quell the violence in South-Central Los Angeles, accusing the department of allocating its resources in a racially discriminatory way.

“People in South-Central have always complained about the response time of police in their neighborhoods,” Ferrer said. “What we saw on April 29 was not just a slow response; it was no response.”

Ferrer said the trucker “is making a yeoman’s effort” to overcome physical and emotional trauma and soon will have more surgery to repair facial scars.

Ferrer said the fact that Denny is white underscores “an irony with a profound message, and that is that racial discrimination affects us all.”