Rumors Fly as King Jury Meets for 7 1/2 Hours

Federal jurors in the Rodney G. King civil rights trial completed their first full day of deliberations Monday, while National Guard troops reported for duty and false rumors of impending verdicts swept Los Angeles.

“It’s nerve-racking,” Ira Salzman, the lawyer for Stacey C. Koon, said of the wait while jurors consider the case. “There’s nothing to do but wait. I can’t even concentrate on my other work.”

Evidence of the city’s edginess surfaced in a blizzard of unsubstantiated reports that the jury had reached verdicts. Local news organizations were swamped with phone calls, and some businesses let employees go home early after rumors suggested that verdicts would be announced Monday afternoon.

Some reports were attributed to overheard police scanner reports, others to various insiders or anonymous tips. Some callers said they had heard radio reports of verdicts coming in, but radio stations said they had not reported the tips that callers said they had heard.

A few of the rumors were disconcertingly specific: A number of callers said they had heard that the jury had reached verdicts and that U.S. District Judge John G. Davies was prepared to announce them at 4 p.m.

That time came and went without an announcement, however, and no evidence surfaced that the jury had completed its work.

In fact, the only communication during the jury’s 7 1/2 hours of deliberations was a note to Judge Davies about 4:25 p.m. Jurors asked whether they could take their notes to study at their hotel, and Davies denied the request.

While the jury deliberated in seclusion, National Guard troops reported for duty shortly after dawn. About 600 guard officers and enlisted men and women--all from local infantry, military police and support units attached to the 49th Infantry Division based on Los Alamitos--were deployed to six armories in Inglewood, Burbank, Glendale, Los Alamitos, Van Nuys and Arcadia.

“Our mission is to save lives and protect people,” said Maj. Gen. Tandy Bozeman, just four months into his appointment as California adjutant general. Bozeman was at a Guard facility in Inglewood--not far from streets still showing the scars of last year’s riots--as troops stormed their own gymnasium in a rehearsal of sniper clearance.

“The purpose of being here is to reassure the people of Los Angeles and be a deterrent effect,” he added.

At Camp Pendleton, meanwhile, 800 Marines readied for a Tuesday exercise where they are to storm and occupy a mock-up of a small town. “This drill is just in case,” said a Marine spokesman.

About 100 Guard members reported to the Inglewood facility, where the parking lot was jammed with camouflaged troop trucks, Humvees and armored personnel carriers. Armament included automatic rifles and light machine guns, and armories already have received ammunition allocations.

It was a sharp contrast to last year, when the Guard was slow to deploy, arrived in Los Angeles without ammunition and was accused by a state report of bungled logistics and poor training.

“That was insane,” remembered Cpl. Eric Cannady, 23, a Fox television cameraman. “Last year, I hadn’t even seen a baton and hadn’t had any riot training apart from the riot itself.”

To avoid inflaming the already jittery city, the Guard’s combat vehicles will be kept off city streets unless officially requested. For now, at least, the public’s only view of Guard activities will be through chain-link fences.

In South-Central Los Angeles, Mayor Tom Bradley tried to reassure 30 elementary students who gathered around him on the floor of the library at Manchester Avenue Elementary School.

“No school was damaged. No school was burned. No school was destroyed (in last year’s riots),” Bradley told the youngsters. “No matter what the verdict is this time . . . we are determined to keep peace in this city and across the nation.”

While the city braced for possible fallout from the trial, the four defendants--Koon, Laurence M. Powell, Timothy E. Wind and Theodore J. Briseno--stayed mostly out of sight. Although most of them have commented throughout the trial, they were attempting to limit their television appearances, hoping to secure a paid interview at the end of the proceedings.

“We need the money,” Powell said. None of the defendants have received paychecks since they were suspended from the Police Department shortly after the March 3, 1991, incident.

Powell and his lawyer spent most of the day holed up inside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building, where the trial has taken place. Outside, a group of demonstrators held a morning news conference to urge calm and to ask that government agencies attend to the “underlying problems” of last year’s civil disturbances.

“We are here today to make a unified statement about what we see as the real issues to be paid attention to,” said Bong Hwan Kim, executive director of the Korean Youth and Community Center. “There’s way too much emphasis on the possible consequences (of the verdict).”

The news conference was a symbolic display of unity after last year’s civil unrest exposed sharp divisions among the city’s ethnic communities. Leaders from African-American, Asian-American and Latino community organizations were present at the event.

“It’s about all of us coming together to work on our collective problems . . . recognizing that we are all in the same boat,” said Shannon Reeves, western regional director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

Reeves echoed the other speakers who cited unemployment, homelessness and economic development as the most pressing issues of the day.

Those issues dominated the news conference, but most of the city reeled under the reports that verdicts were about to be announced.

The rumors swept across the state Monday afternoon, stirring up excitement at local businesses and in the state Capitol.

Police and sheriff’s switchboards in the Los Angeles area were jammed with calls from concerned residents who had heard a variety of stories--all of them false--concerning the trial, a verdict and planned attacks by roving gang members.

A volunteer manning a rumor hot line set up by Los Angeles Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores said calls were coming in every 30 seconds or so.

“There’s just a general sense of panic because people think the verdicts are coming,” said Juan Vigil, who has been working on the hot line since last week.

Vigil said one man called to say he had heard that gang members from Northern California had fabricated 30,000 bogus LAPD uniforms to use during attacks after the verdict comes in. Other wild stories told of hordes of gang members planning to pillage the San Fernando Valley, with certain wealthy neighborhoods targeted for looting.

The rumors that a verdict had been reached began ricocheting back and forth between the Chiat/Day, McCann-Erickson, Lord, Dentsu & Partners, and Foot, Cone & Belding agencies in Los Angeles shortly after noon. By 4 p.m., both Chiat/Day and McCann-Erickson had closed early.

In Sacramento, a call to a man with a portable phone at an Assembly Transportation Committee hearing on motorcycle helmet laws sent rumors spinning through the room.

Within minutes, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s office had called to check the reports with The Times. About the same time, Gov. Pete Wilson’s office got a call from an ABC television reporter, asking whether the stories were true.

At the eye of the storm, prosecutors and lawyers for the officers remained on call for any developments. Judge Davies has ordered them to be within 15 minutes of his courtroom, and they nervously paced the courthouse hallways, searching for clues from the silent jury.

They, too, heard the swirling rumors, and several defense attorneys repeatedly emerged in a sixth-floor press room on Monday to reassure reporters that they had no word of verdicts.

Aside from the request filed late Monday, the only communication from the jury has been a single note, filed Sunday and requesting a transcript of the testimony from California Highway Patrol Officer Melanie Singer. Singer, who broke into tears on the witness stand, told jurors that she had seen Powell strike King six times on the face and head.

Davies denied the jury request for that transcript, saying he was concerned that providing transcripts would tend to overemphasize the testimony of a particular witness. It is common practice for judges to deny jurors access to transcripts for that reason.

On Monday, jurors broke for 40 minutes for lunch. Starved for other clues, some of the lawyers pondered whether the short break indicated that the jury might be pressing quickly because it was close to reaching verdicts.

But the attorneys said that any speculation was nothing more than a guessing game.

“There’s no way to predict this,” said Harland W. Braun, the lawyer for Briseno. “All you can do is wait.”

Times staff writers Eric Malnic, Paul Dean, Dan Morain, Somini Sengupta and Consella A. Lee contributed to this story.

Update: The King Trial

A look at the key developments Monday:

Jurors deliberated for the third day--their first full one. So far, the jury has spent a total of 15 hours deliberating the case. During that time, members have selected a foreman and sent two notes to the judge.

About 600 National Guard troops reported for duty at six Los Angeles area armories. The troops are remaining in their armories in order to avoid fueling community fears, but will be on hand if needed after verdicts are announced.

At a news conference outside the federal courthouse where jurors were at work, a coalition of activists from across the community called for calm regardless of the verdicts and urged politicians to pay more attention to the root causes of last year’s unrest.