Witnesses Testify That King Was Compliant : Courts: Two civilians say they saw police repeatedly strike the motorist. One woman contends that the officers were laughing afterward. Neither observer was called in the first trial.

Two civilian witnesses to the police beating of Rodney G. King testified in court for the first time Friday, with both telling jurors that King never tried to strike the officers and one recalling that King pleaded for the officers to stop.

“He was just dodging blows. He was on the ground. It sounded like I heard him scream out: ‘Please stop!’ ” said Dorothy Gibson, a registered nurse who lived in an apartment complex across the street from where the incident occurred just after midnight March 3, 1991. “I saw them kick the man. . . . Any way they could get a lick in, they were kicking him.”

Gibson struggled for composure at one point during her testimony. Her voice cracked as she tried to respond to a question from Barry F. Kowalski, one of the lead prosecutors in the case, who had asked her to recall what the officers did after they subdued King.

“They were talking, and they were laughing,” Gibson said. “That was the last I saw of (King).”

The testimony by Gibson and Robert Hill, a detention services officer who said he watched the beating from about 30 yards away, marked the first time that jurors have heard from civilian witnesses to the incident. Los Angeles County prosecutors decided against calling any non-police witnesses during last year’s state trial of the officers, in part because some civilian accounts have shifted over time and are contradicted in some respects by the videotape of the beating.

Defense lawyers took advantage of those inconsistencies to gently challenge the credibility of Gibson and Hill--both of whom testified before a federal grand jury last May.

Michael P. Stone, who represents Officer Laurence M. Powell, pressed Gibson on whether she could say for sure that it was King who yelled “Please stop.” During her testimony before the federal grand jury May 21, 1992, Gibson recalled hearing those words, but she was unclear about who said them.

“It could have been somebody else telling them to stop, but it sounded to me like it could have been Mr. King,” she said during that closed-door session, according to a transcript.

“You heard the words: ‘Please stop,’ but you don’t know who said it, do you?” Stone asked during cross-examination Friday.

“No, I don’t know,” Gibson responded.

Paul R. DePasquale, who represents Timothy E. Wind, took that challenge further, raising questions about Gibson’s statements to an investigator from the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, as well as her appearance before the federal grand jury.

Presented with two statements that appeared to be contradicted by the version she gave Friday, Gibson said the transcripts of the earlier hearings must be in error.

Hill’s account was not as compromised by questioning from defense lawyers, and he balked at Stone’s efforts to coax him into saying that the officers only used their batons in response to movement by King.

“Every time the officers hit Mr. King, he was moving?” Stone asked.

“Mr. King was moving every time he was hit with the baton,” Hill said. “He was reacting.”

Although both civilian witnesses acknowledged that their memories of the event were not perfect, their appearance captivated jurors, many of whom sat forward in their chairs as Gibson and Hill were asked to re-enact their versions of the King beating. Later, Stone said he believed the two made an impression on the jurors, but he predicted that by the end of the trial the jury will base its impression of the beating on the videotape, not the testimony of these or other witnesses.

As the trial concluded its first week including testimony, defense lawyers reacted to a surprise prosecution disclosure made during opening statements Thursday. Assistant U.S. Atty. Steven D. Clymer told jurors that two defendants, Powell and Wind, had detoured to the Foothill Division with King when they were supposed to be transporting him from Pacifica Hospital to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.

Clymer said that while the officers were at the Foothill station, Powell invited officers from inside the station to come out and look at their suspect, who was left to languish for nearly two hours in the back seat of the police car.

That accusation struck a nerve in the defense team and sparked a particularly angry response from another defendant, Sgt. Stacey C. Koon.

“This is so infuriating to me,” Koon said during a break in the trial. “They’ve taken something that was completely innocent and tried to look at it not in a scientific way, but instead with this spin they put on it.”

Koon and other defendants agree that Powell and Wind stopped at the station with King, but they say the detour was made to expedite the process of booking their suspect into the hospital’s jail ward. That process is common, Koon said, and means that less time is wasted waiting at the jail ward.

Koon conceded that the log filed by Powell and Wind does not mention the stop at Foothill Division, but he said that was a common oversight in such documents. “It’s absolutely no big thing,” he said.

Although Clymer did not say which officers Powell allegedly sent out to look at King, transcripts of internal affairs reports suggest that it was Officer Martin Garcia and Officer Daniel Gonzalez. Both were interviewed by the Internal Affairs Division within a month of the King beating.

Garcia told investigators that he recalled seeing King in the back of a patrol car after another officer, whom he did not recognize, asked him and Gonzalez to look at King.

Garcia “noticed that King was injured; his right cheek was swollen,” according to the internal affairs report. King appeared to be handcuffed but not hogtied, and “his physical condition looked like he had been beaten,” Garcia told investigators.

Although Garcia does not appear on the list of 36 witnesses whom the prosecution intends to call in this case, Gonzalez is listed. He is scheduled to testify near the conclusion of the government’s case.