Riot Survivor Can’t Escape Web of Violence : Slaying: Korean grocer Hyung Soo Kim rebuilt his South-Central market, only to die in a robbery. His family worries that he will become a symbol that further inflames racial tensions.

Another grocer might have fled. But after Hyung Soo Kim’s market in South-Central Los Angeles was looted and trashed during the riots last spring, the 65-year-old Korean immigrant decided to stay and rebuild. Such was his commitment to the neighborhood, his family says.

And many people in this African-American and Latino neighborhood were grateful. If people didn’t like Kim, 20-year-old Shavonda Rivers suggested Friday, then the rioters would have gone beyond looting and vandalism. “You see his store is still up,” she said Friday.

But on Thursday night Kim was victimized again. This time, police say, he was lured out of his store by a 13-year-old boy. Once outside, Kim was robbed and beaten, police say, by a 26-year-old man described as a gang member. Kim, married and a father of two adult sons, died from his injuries Friday morning.

The last thing Kim would want, his family says, is to be remembered as a martyr to his people, a symbol in an ethnic cause. But in a city riven by racial and ethnic turmoil, there is fear that Kim’s slaying adds salt to the deeply wounded relations between the Korean and African-American communities.

As Los Angeles nervously awaits the outcome of two portentous trials, some say that Kim’s fate--the third slaying of a Korean merchant in the last three months--ominously echoes racially charged violence that presaged the 1992 unrest.

Black-Korean tensions reached the boiling point after the March, 1991, slaying of 14-year-old Latasha Harlins by Korean-born grocer Soon Ja Du.

Even though Kim’s family and neighborhood residents express doubts that race was a factor in this crime, they and community leaders acknowledge that the racial implications are unavoidable in Los Angeles’ current state of tension.

In December, the 7-year-old Black-Korean Alliance, the city’s oldest organization dedicated to easing tensions between the two communities, disbanded after members agreed that their efforts were making little headway. The alliance was formed initially as a reaction to a spate of crimes against Korean merchants, said Bong Hwan Kim, executive director of the Korean Youth Center and former co-chair of the Black-Korean Alliance.

Hyung Soo Kim is the third Korean merchant to have been slain in the last three months. In November, Sung Ha Lee, 58, was stabbed to death in the Watts area; police say his killers are black. Seung Ho Kim, who was slain in East Los Angeles in January, was killed by a Latino, police say. On Friday at the Kim family’s graffiti-marred market, Kim’s eldest son asked that his name and the store’s name not be published. With the 13-year-old suspect under arrest but the primary suspect still at large, he said he feared further violence against the family and the store’s employees.

“I don’t want it to be a racial issue,” said Kim’s 28-year-son. His father’s slaying, he said, was “just pure and simple a very brutal crime. . . . I don’t want this racial problem to be blown up more.”

Relations between the black and Korean communities “certainly haven’t got any better since the rebellion, and they may have in fact deteriorated,” said Joe Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and formerly a co-chair of the Black-Korean Alliance.

Bong Hwan Kim and Hicks said that tensions will be relieved only when economic prospects improve in the inner city.

“The level of resentment and anger that’s directed at Koreans is still very much alive,” Bong Hwan Kim said. Some Korean merchants, he said, have had “people from neighborhoods coming in and saying they should leave and sell out their stores to African-Americans.”

“At the street level, the animosity, the hatred, the feeling that Koreans are depriving African-Americans of economic survival is real,” he added. “And it’s something that hasn’t been acknowledged enough by community leaders, political leaders or Rebuild L.A.”

Like Hicks, Bong Hwan Kim emphasized that merchants of every race and ethnicity are victimized in high-crime areas.

“But if it’s a Korean or an Asian store owner, I believe they are more like to pull the trigger, just to spite them,” Bong Hwan Kim added. “This is another indication of growing violence against Asians in America.”

Hicks said that crimes involving members of different ethnic groups add to “a growing sense of apprehension in the city.”

“There are few conversations I engage in that that doesn’t come up--what’s going to happen out of these trials,” said Hicks, referring to the federal trial of the four white Los Angeles police officers involved in the beating of Rodney G. King and the trial of four black suspects in the beating of white trucker Reginald O. Denny. “It permeates almost everything that goes on in the city.”

Hicks faulted the media for “developing a circus atmosphere” and Los Angeles police and the county Sheriff’s Department for a get-tough attitude in anticipating more riots.

“There’s almost a growing mood of confrontation that pushes us closer to the brink,” Hicks said.

Angela Oh, an attorney and activist in the Korean community, expressed concern that Kim’s murder will add to an attitude which has many merchants arming themselves with automatic weapons as a safeguard against more rioting. “This whole city is walking this path of insanity,” Oh said.

It would be sadly ironic, Hyung Soo Kim’s wife and two sons suggest, if his death generated more animosity. The family says it has been comforted by flowers and condolences from customers. Near signs advertising specials on malt liquor and refried beans, a customer put up a poster for the Kims saying: “God Bless You. We Love You, True Friends!”

Kim’s son was touched by the gesture. “We have to live together,” he said. “This is what my father always said. We have to learn to love one another all the time.”

Trevone Gray, a black 20-year-old auto mechanic who works next door to the Kim’s grocery, said the victim “was nice to everybody around here. He was a real good guy.” Kim’s slaying, Gray added, “didn’t make . . . sense. They robbed the guy. Why’d they beat him?”

Kim was not killed because he was Korean, Gray said. “It’s more just that everybody’s hungry,” he said. “Everybody is hungry--for money, a job, whatever.”

In a community where crime witnesses often fear retaliation if they help police investigations, Detective R. Flores suggested that Kim’s popularity has resulted in a flurry of anonymous tips.

Authorities have identified Willie Talos, 26, as the prime adult suspect. He is not in custody, police said.

As for the 13-year-old accomplice who is in custody, Flores said that older gang members, “impress them when they’re at that age.”