2 Officers Guilty, 2 Acquitted : Guarded Calm Follows Verdicts in King Case : Scene: Los Angeles wakes up to a day of anxiety and rejoicing. The city is spared the nightmare that some had feared.

No morning had carried more dread. No other moment in the long, fractured history of Los Angeles had arrived so pregnant with the fear of war on the streets. The guns were out there. The anger was still evident in burned-out quarters of the inner city. Racial tensions and rumors had brought out the police and members of the National Guard by the thousands, an army deployed in the pre-dawn darkness.

Not quite a year after the nation’s most deadly urban riots this century, the forces of fate and circumstance seemed colluding to start the whole nightmare again--Round 2.

Only this time it turned out differently. This time, on a misty Saturday morning, the second Rodney G. King trial in two years ended with guilty verdicts against two of the four Los Angeles police officers, setting in motion an extraordinary day. It was a day of rejoicing and anxiety and fragile peace. It was a day of roiling emotions as a racially divided city struggled to take meaning from the felony convictions and the acquittals of the two other officers accused of beating King two years ago.

There was anger, but anger far below the flash point. With the entire world watching, Los Angeles went through its Saturday morning rituals of coffee and Little League and cookouts and childbirth knowing there would be no explosion, no tragic deja vu.

The city allowed itself a few smiles, some nervous laughter and a collective sigh.

The day unfolded this way:

THE MORNING: Hoping for ‘a Nice Quiet Day’

The sun had not been up for long when Gurtha Allen, 47, a housekeeper who lives in Jordan Downs, one of the city’s most troubled housing projects, heard the verdicts, sat bolt upright in bed and said: “Thank you, Jesus!”

There were, to be sure, undercurrents of unrest. The jury’s unwillingness to convict all four officers left a bitter taste among some who denounced the decision as only “partial justice.” But new Police Chief Willie L. Williams would get his way. He had been up since 3:45 a.m. After only four hours of sleep, he went to his sixth-floor Parker Center office, where he directed a fully deployed force on tactical alert.

Shortly before court convened at 7 a.m., Williams flipped through television channels with a remote control and glanced out his window to the new Edward R. Roybal Federal Building, where the trial was held. Elbows on his desk, the chief nervously played with a pen as the proceedings began.

At the announcement of the first verdict--a guilty finding against Sgt. Stacey C. Koon--Williams arched an eyebrow and scratched a note on a legal pad. “A heck of a way to start my second year,” he would say later, relieved.

As the judgments came down--first the two guilty findings against Koon and Officer Laurence M. Powell, then the acquittals of Officer Theodore J. Briseno and former Officer Timothy E. Wind--the city stood braced with police in seemingly every strategic point: 3,000 LAPD officers, 1,350 Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, 1,500 California Highway Patrol officers, 700 members of the National Guard, and others.

In South Los Angeles, Fire Station 64 and the nearby Southeast Division police station became a fortified compound. Barricades blocked both sides of 108th Street. After the repeated attacks last year against city firefighters trying to quench more than 1,000 arson fires, every precaution was being made.

“We’ve got police escorts on everything, “ Battalion Chief Thomas Wilson said.

‘There’s a Kind of Sadness’

The methodical reading of the verdicts flashed across the city to any place with a TV or radio. At the LAPD’s South Bureau command post near the Coliseum, dozens of officers crowded around three televisions, listening in absolute silence. No emotion was apparent, though LAPD Sgt. Gene McCloskey voiced sympathy for his accused colleagues.

“There’s a kind of sadness, like one of your children goes down and commits a murder,” he said. “You feel like that because we’re all family, in a way. And whether they were guilty or not, their lives are ruined (and) they lost their jobs. . . .

At the moment the judgments were read, African-American painting contractor Karl Vance of Long Beach happened to be driving through Beverly Hills. He later talked of how drivers next to him at intersections looked over, saw that he was black and locked their doors.

“Do you know what it’s like to sit in your car and hear doors locking?” he asked. But he expressed hope that the verdicts would help improve race relations. “I feel proud today to be in L.A. as a black male,” he said. “I felt like wanting to flash someone the peace sign.”

Patti Friedel, 39, heard the news at a deli in Westwood. Pausing in front of a huge TV in the waiting area, she watched with teary eyes. “Thank God,” she said simply.

At Koreatown’s Hannam Supermarket, where a security guard was killed last year in a cross-fire of bullets, the owner of a South-Central fish and chips store wheeled a shopping cart down the aisle. In-Sook Kim’s basket contained heavy bags full of ground beef and oranges. He smiled broadly.

“During these past few weeks, I prayed a lot,” said Kim, 60, whose restaurant was looted and suffered $20,000 in damage last year. “(Now) I’m satisfied.”

‘Something to Pacify the Public’s Tension’

Rancor came not in firestorms, but in quiet moments. At a street corner on Vermont Avenue, the most badly burned thoroughfare a year ago, a young African-American who called himself Sean X stood in front of a barbershop. Four police cars whizzed past in only 10 minutes. A city ambulance pulled up nearby, escorted by two CHP cars.

As paramedics whisked away someone who had fallen ill on the street, an officer stood guard with a shotgun.

“They come in force, like it was a riot,” Sean X grumbled. “People with guns and carbines. . . . It’s like we’re in jail again, like last year.”

At Imperial Courts, a Watts housing project, Bumper Jack, 30, had spent a sleepless night. In the gray morning, he stood in an outdoor courtyard, sucking on a bottle of malt liquor and explaining how his moniker had been earned by stealing cars. Any satisfaction over the verdicts was tempered by the grim routine of life in the projects, he and a friend, Heavy-D, agreed.

Koon and Powell were just scapegoats, they said, and their convictions--while deserved--would do little to improve things.

“You know how it goes. They give up one or two to make everything seem right. . . . They needed something to pacify the public’s tension. But ain’t nothing changed.” Heavy-D was talking. He said the justice system simply does not work for African-Americans. “We’d do better walking through a cage of hungry lions with a double-breasted pork chop suit on than get a fair shake in court.”

Just 10 feet away, a bare mound of earth marked the place where Henry Peco was shot to death by police in November, 1991, another incident that had become a cause celebre.

This Is Going to ‘Defuse the Denny Trial’

Throughout the inner city, where King’s beating had been viewed as an affront by police against all blacks, the verdicts were the subject of endless analysis.

“What this is going to do is . . . to defuse the (Reginald) Denny trial,” said Crenshaw district optician Richard Andrews. “If they’d set these (officers) free and convicted those other guys (three black suspects accused in the attack on Denny, a white trucker) later, it would have been a big problem.”

Andrews, whose shop had been burned a year ago, was ebullient. “It’s like a halo’s over my head right now,” he said. “It’s hard to describe.”

Only blocks away, Jamil Shabazz, 40, the owner of the Crenshaw Cafe, characterized the verdicts as a “very intelligent move” designed to appease blacks and prevent further violence.

“I frankly believe it was a token that was given to the community so there wouldn’t be any type of reaction again in terms of a rebellion,” Shabazz said. “What they did was give us a little pacifier. . . .”

Hollywood merchant Ron Mohaber complained that King had become would “a millionaire and famous,” while the officers were unfairly convicted. “The SOB (was) going too fast,” he said of King’s driving before the arrest. “The cop is chasing you. You should stop. Why speed up?”

Against the backdrop of introspection and second-guessing, a nervous city awaited signs of trouble. In the San Fernando Valley, a fire erupted at a Ventura Boulevard mini-mall. More than 25 police officers, many in riot gear, converged on the scene, anticipating the possibility of arson.

Fire officials later blamed it on faulty wiring.

The fire destroyed a restaurant and several stores at Winnetka Square. With embers still smoldering, Geulla Madiel, 31, pulled into the parking lot and was asked if she thought the fire was a result of the verdict in the King trial.

“Trial? I don’t know about such a trial,” she said. “Who is this Rodman King?”

Except for such false alarms, the morning played out quietly, in the usual eccentric cycles of urban life. Dean Satterfield, 43, and his twin brother, Drew, did what they do most every morning in South Los Angeles. They searched the streets and alleys for bottles and cans to turn in for money.

More than the fate of the officers, they were concerned with whether they could make the $20 they needed.

“I’m keeping my fingers crossed,” Dean said.

Anthony Bell, 31, an African-American with bright gold earrings, led a group of 10 young men, all sentenced to do community service work, to industrial buildings along Slauson Avenue. With long-handled rollers, they were painting out graffiti.

“A bunch of them hit here last night,” Bell said, referring to taggers. “There must have been a little tagging war.

A morning bake sale went on as scheduled at the Mt. Gilead Baptist Church in Pacoima. Inside, choir members rehearsed. “Just the idea of them putting handcuffs on Koon, that did me a world of good, “ church member Pat Rigdell said.

In Long Beach, 73,500 spectators turned out for racing trials of the Grand Prix--a few thousand fewer than last year, but above expectations.

At many places, the verdicts gave shape to the day’s events. In the Pico-Union district, one of the city’s most devastated quarters during last year’s unrest, Juan Zamora, a native of El Salvador, stood with friends. A year ago, he owned a shoe store on Union Street. It was burned out. Zamora lost $85,000 in belongings. He had no insurance. He began repairing shoes on a street corner and trying to rebuild in East Los Angeles, where he considered it to be safer.

It took him a year to open his new store.

But he felt obliged to return to Pico-Union for the verdicts--to show friends that he had not abandoned them. “It’s certain that someone got some justice,” he said shortly after the jury’s decision. Then he threw up his hands.

“But what about us?” he demanded. “The direct victims of the riots.”

In another part of the metropolis, two dozen regulars--all African-American--played basketball in Inglewood’s Centinela Park. Upset that two of the officers were not convicted, they took out their frustrations in spirited pickup games.

“All of the officers beat (King),” said 42-year-old Al Baskerville. “We all saw that. We’re not stupid.”

The heavy police presence was on the minds of many. A minor robbery in Watts drew more than a dozen officers, their shotguns and handguns drawn. Television and police helicopters hovered overhead.

“This is stupid,” remarked 14-year-old Tyrese Gibson, part of a crowd of onlookers near 103rd Street and Central Avenue. Word had it that the alleged victim shot the alleged suspect in a non-vital part of the anatomy.

There was no report of any arrest.

“It’s a simple robbery,” Tyrese said. “A guy got shot in the butt.”

THE AFTERNOON: ‘I Think the Verdict . . . Satisfied Everybody’

As the day progressed, an emboldened populace began to emerge from their homes. By 11:30 a.m., as the sun began to poke through the fog that had clung to the city all morning, it was business as usual along Hollywood Boulevard, which had been deserted all morning.

Tourists returned in full force, wandering into stores selling everything from postcards to cheap lingerie. The courtyard of the landmark Mann’s Chinese Theatre was jammed with dozens of visitors, many with cameras, who checked their footprints against those of movie stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

As tour guides walked people around the courtyard and a homeless man with one shoe begged for change, a woman took pictures of Mickey Mouse’s star while a man hawked free tickets for a new TV pilot.

Across the street, Tally and Mike Roszkowsky of Racine, Wis., stood near the star of Chuck Connors and talked about the verdicts. The couple had spent the morning touring Hollywood but were planning to head to Beverly Hills in the afternoon.

Tally Roszkowsky, a mother of two, said she had a stomachache all week from fear there would be renewed violence in the wake of the verdicts. But the outcome of the trial was such a relief, she said, that she immediately phoned her mother-in-law in Wisconsin to tell her the news.

“I think the verdict that came out satisfied everybody,” Mike Roszkowsky said.

If all of the officers had been acquitted, his wife added, “I would have gotten my big butt on an airplane and gone home. I didn’t care what it cost.”

Lights Flashing, Emergency Vehicles Rush to a Birth

Life went on in other ways as well, though profoundly altered by the King verdicts. When Shannon Sheppard, 20, dialed 911 just before noon to report that her friend, Yakyshia Hill was in labor, she had no idea what was around the corner.

Within moments, a paramedic team accompanied by a fire engine and escorted by three Highway Patrol vehicles swept into Sheppard’s placid residential neighborhood, lights flashing. Screeching to a halt, the Highway Patrol cars stationed themselves in front and behind the paramedic unit and blocked off the street.

Then, about 10 CHP officers in riot helmets posted themselves outside their vehicles with their pistols and rifles drawn, forming a forbidding defensive perimeter around the paramedics.

Stunned neighbors came out of their houses, just to watch.

“This was just too much,” said Sheppard. “I knew the paramedics were coming, but I didn’t know these other guys would come with their guns.”

The new bundle had yet to arrive by noontime.

“All for a baby,” Sheppard said.

‘Overall, the Mood Is Happy. Not Jubilant.’

When violence swept the city last spring, black-owned radio station KJLH canceled its normal music mix and opened up its microphones to callers expressing their anguish and outrage. After Saturday’s verdict, the station opened its phones again. But unlike 1992, when community outrage led the station to suspend regular programming for three days, Saturday’s calls lasted only six hours--from 6:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m.--before the programming returned to music.

“If they (callers) were still upset and hostile about the verdicts, it would be something else,” the station’s general manager Karen Slade says around 3 p.m. “But I think overall, the mood is happy. Not jubilant. But overall, expectations were so low about this trial that when there two (convictions) there was some relief, some feeling the system can work.”

One woman professed happiness over the verdicts, but wondered if there can be just verdicts in the case of the three black men charged in the assault on Denny.

But a caller who identified himself as white said he thought justice had been served in Simi Valley. “It’s funny,” he said, “how when it’s a favorable verdict it’s justice, and when it’s not it’s injustice.”

Another woman remembered the riots of 1965 and 1992, saying she feared that “problems just fester and then come up again. Is that what we have to look forward to?”

‘I Hope Business Is Better Again’

The sun burst through the downtown overcast just after 1 p.m. Soon afterward, Gabriel Morales was busy again with his electric saw.

Through much of Friday, the 36-year-old Morales had used his carpentry skills to put up 48 feet of plywood across the long bank of display windows at the New York Bakery in Koreatown. But at 1:20 p.m. Saturday afternoon, the screech of Morales’ saw again pierced the monotonous rumble of passing traffic. This time the plywood was being crafted for a different purpose.

Morales, a driver for the bakery, was helping neighbor K.C. Lee add a shelf to his cramped key shop, a closet-sized enterprise at the edge of the bakery’s parking lot.

There was still enough wood to cover the bakery windows should things turn for the worse, but Morales and Lee said they doubted they would need it.

“He is a good neighbor,” Lee said of Morales, using hand and arm gestures to direct the installation when their English skills fell short. “Now I hope business is better again. It has been very bad for a year.”

Ward’s Furniture was the only major store along the Pacific Avenue in Long Beach that was not looted or burned last year. This time, owner Brad Ward worried that he wouldn’t be spared. “We’re prepared for the worst,” said Ward, 28.

By noon, an elderly couple had bought a new Zenith television, another retiree chatted about buying a new bed and a few browsers had stopped in. Ranchera music filled the shop as Brad’s cousin demonstrated a stereo to shoppers.

Then another couple bought a $1,000 bedroom set. And by mid-afternoon, Ward said with relief: “It’s just business as usual.”

‘I Feel Like They All Should Get Time’

Accompanied by John Mack of the Urban League and Rep. Maxine Waters, the Rev. Jesse Jackson walked through the Avalon Gardens housing project much as if he was campaigning for office, shaking hands and greeting residents with a warm smile as the afternoon moved along.

Tonya Majors, 28, held her 21-month-old daughter Naomi in her arms as she told Jackson that the verdicts disappointed her.

Tonya said, “I’m disappointed. I feel like they all should get time. To me, justice wasn’t served.”

Jackson reassured her, saying there was a “marked contrast” between the jury verdicts in Simi Valley and the ones in Los Angeles and stressing the need to move forward.

“What we need to do now is to get away from the jury verdicts and develop a plan. We need a plan for aid, trade, credit and development.” Jackson said.

Later, Jackson told reporters that people he talked to were relieved by the verdicts, but not necessarily satisfied.

“There is a sense of relief, but people know that relief is not a remedy,” Jackson said. “‘We need to move from the courthouse to the White House.”

‘A Collective Sigh of Relief’

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony emerged into the flower-festooned garden of St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in the heart of Skid Row at 2 p.m., a green ribbon symbolizing hope on the lapel of his black clerical suit.

Up with the dawn to watch the verdicts on television, the Roman Catholic prelate said the quiet aftermath confirmed his feeling that the jury’s verdict meant no less than “the end of the 1992 riots.”

“I almost felt a collective sigh of relief, and really felt this cloud has now left us,” he told reporters. “People now feel there’s been justice done. Now we can look forward and not behind, and really make this city what it can be.”

Even had the verdicts gone the other way, he said, new links between churches, the business community, government and neighborhood groups since the first verdict--”alliances we never had before”--might well have contained any violence.

“The power of prayer has been enormous over the last year and over the last several weeks,” he said, “and prayer makes a difference.”

THE EVENING: ‘What If I’m Not Going to Have a Party?’

At 4 o’clock p.m., a vision of loveliness appeared in Willowbrook Park--a radiant, rosy-lipped girl in a frilly white dress, peach roses pinned in her hair. It was Erika Hernandez, 15, and Saturday was the day of her quinceanera , the traditional Latin American celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday.

“I’ve been waiting for this for so long,” Hernandez said as she posed for photographs just an hour before her party was scheduled to begin at a hall in South-Central Los Angeles.

For a full year, Hernandez’s family had been preparing for her special day. Two hundred guests were invited. Arrangements were made to feed everyone birria, a Mexican-style stewed goat. So on Friday, when she heard that verdicts were expected, Hernandez said, “I was scared. I thought, ‘What if I’m not going to have a party? They already rented their tuxes and everything.’ ”

But on Saturday, when her family woke to hear that the city was calmly greeting the news of two convictions, they they were actually pleased with the verdicts’ timing.

“It’s a special quinceanera --not easy to forget,” said Elena Miranda, 46, an aunt from Cudahy. Then, as suddenly as Hernandez appeared, she was gone, whisked off in a white stretch Lincoln Towncar.

‘Tomorrow? . . . It Could All Happen Again’

At 5 p.m., Melvin El stood on Crenshaw Boulevard near Slauson, hawking a $10 T-shirt that he said had been inspired by a dream.

The front of the shirt showed Powell, Koon, Briseno and Wind, dressed in black and white striped prison uniforms, sitting side by side on a bench. Koon had a ball and chain shackled to his ankle. “Home Sweet Home,” said a caption above the officers. Rodney King, pictured in the background, was labeled this way: “$56 Million richer.”

The back of the shirt showed Powell beating Wind on the head with a baton. Koon looks on in a bubble above his head. One can read what’s in his mind: “I told you fools to stop. Look at us now.”

El, the creator of the black-on-white shirt, said his shirts “are selling like hot cakes. This is justice.”

As darkness fell over Los Angeles, there was none of the leaping flames and intense violence that had dominated the city a year ago. A small community of urban refugees collected on the beachside deck of Gladstones 4 Fish restaurant in Malibu. Jesse Flores and Mary Reyes sat behind a row of empty margarita glasses that separated them from the blazing sunset. They had come to celebrate Flores’ 33rd birthday, but spent the day fretting for their hometown.

“I feel better,” Flores said after pondering the day’s events. “People are content with the decision right now. Tomorrow? It depends. It could all happen again.”

Around the county, wary residents stayed home in droves, resulting in sparse crowds at popular nightspots such as Ca’Brea restaurant in the Miracle Mile district.

“The other half decided it was too dangerous,” one man in a dress shirt told the maitre d’ apologetically as his 8:30 reservation was sliced from four to two. “I couldn’t get them to come.”

Aldo Mauro, a photographer who moved west from New York just before last year’s riots, was one of the adventurous. He and his wife, Donna, blamed the media for much of the uproar and had no second thoughts about eating out for dinner.

“It is a new city,” Aldo said optimistically, tipping a glass of scotch at the Ca’Brea Bar. “It is going to open up.” Last year, the largely immigrant Latino Pico-Union neighborhood was one of the hardest hit.

But Saturday night at 8 p.m., the streets were eerily quiet.

Indeed, Los Angeles Rampart Division police reported no verdict-related calls all day.

‘It’s so dead out here it’s unbelievable,” said LAPD Officer Tom Hazelton, as he cruised down Alvarado Street.