Riot Victim Pushes for a Monument to Good Samaritans : Memorial: Raul Aguilar was severely beaten during last year’s violence. Now recovered, he wants the city to pay tribute to the people who rescued him from attackers.

Reginald O. Denny and Raul Aguilar have never met, but they have a lot in common.

Both men were viciously beaten during the riots that followed not guilty verdicts in the state trial last year of four Los Angeles police officers accused in the beating of Rodney G. King.

Denny and Aguilar both suffered life-threatening injuries, and for a time they were two beds away from each other in the intensive-care unit of Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood.

And both have survived the long road to recovery.

But, although Denny, a truck driver formerly from Covina, recently filed two separate $40-million lawsuits against the city of Los Angeles, Aguilar, who shares an Echo Park home with his sister and her daughter, wants the city to do only one thing for him: build a small monument to the heroes of Los Angeles who rescued him and other riot victims.

“Many people encouraged me to file lawsuits,” Aguilar said recently. “But I don’t want to take away from the city. It would be conflicting with what I want to give to the city.”

The gift that Aguilar, who turned 45 this month, wants to give is a poem, and a quiet place, with perhaps a fountain and some flowers, where people could come read his words and learn of his experience.

“I don’t know much about art,” said Aguilar, a student who, before he was beaten, supported himself as a wedding photographer on weekends. “But I think it would be a beautiful place.”

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Like many riot victims, Aguilar had no idea that the April 29, 1992, verdicts would unleashed the maelstrom that engulfed him.

Shortly after television showed the late afternoon attack on Denny at Florence and Normandy avenues, just two blocks away Aguilar was pummeled through the window of his navy blue van by an angry throng on Firestone Boulevard. He had just finished visiting friends at their home nearby.

One assailant had pulled out the van’s gear shift lever, so Aguilar, who is 5 feet, 4 inches tall and at the time weighed 125 pounds, tried to push the crippled vehicle down Florence and out of harm’s way.

While he was pushing his van, a gang of youths came up from behind. One used a crowbar to break open his head. Aguilar was knocked unconscious and does not remember the beating that followed or the car that drove over his right leg, crushing his bones.

Unlike the Denny attack, no television cameras recorded Aguilar’s beating, and it has been nearly impossible for police to identify his attackers. Los Angeles Police Detective Art Daedlow said none of the witnesses could pick out the assailants from police pictures. But Daedlow says that the case, one of 41 riot beatings being investigated by his department, remains open.

Barbara Henry was one of the witnesses. And although she cannot identify Aguilar’s attackers, she remembers every detail of that night. Henry was standing on her porch with her son, Jacques, 11 at the time, and watched in horror as her neighborhood was taken over by rioters.

“All of a sudden, the police left (the area), and it was like flies on a piece of meat,” she said. “The police left and everybody came. I felt totally abandoned. People were throwing bottles. They weren’t drinking the beer, honey, they were throwing it.”

Despite her fears, Henry and her son surveyed the chaos from the porch and, in the middle of it all, spied Aguilar pushing his van.

“Some guys came in a car and spotted Raul. They parked the car and then, Bonnie and Clyde-style, they jumped out and started beating him,” Henry recalls. “They didn’t know him from Adam and they just sucker-punched him.”

Henry, a postal employee, started screaming for her husband, James, who arrived at the end of the beating.

“I didn’t really have time to think about it,” James Henry said of his split-second decision to dodge cars, bottles and rioters to snatch Aguilar from the street and out of the path of careening cars.

“It was like the Indy 500 out there,” recalled Aguilar’s rescuer and now friend. “Raul was hurt and he was going to get killed.”

But thanks to the Henrys, Aguilar survived.

James Henry laid the unconscious man on the sidewalk and covered him with a blanket he found in the van.

“The police wouldn’t come,” said James Henry, 42, a supervisor at Rockwell International in El Segundo.

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But he was not to be put off. After waiting 20 minutes, Henry, who stands more than six feet tall and weighs 230 pounds, finally stopped a van carrying members of a police SWAT team. Henry says the officers inside were preoccupied with trying to control the rioting and did not want to take Aguilar.

But, Henry said, he gave them no choice. He said he picked Aguilar up and placed him in the vehicle in the aisle between the two rows of seats.

Hospital records show that Aguilar arrived at the emergency room in an ambulance at about 8:40 p.m., shortly after Henry put him in the SWAT van.

“I didn’t think at the time that I did something heroic,” said James Henry, who was honored by Rockwell for rescuing Aguilar. “I would just hope someone would do the same for me that I did for him.”

There was a price to pay for that bravery, however. After watching his father dodging the bottles and cars, Jacques fled to his room, where he began to scream, his mother said.

“He totally freaked out,” Barbara Henry said, adding that her son still will not sleep on the top bunk in his bedroom, where a bullet came through the wall. And he refuses to walk on Florence Avenue.

“He’s very protective of his father now,” his mother added. “We finally had to go to counseling. And that’s not something we ever did.

“You go talk to your grandma if you’ve got a problem,” she said the Henrys had always used to say.

Because they lost their electricity and phones the night the riots began, it was a week before the Henrys learned Aguilar’s fate. And it was days before Aguilar regained consciousness and days more before he found out what the Henrys had done for him.

Now, though, Aguilar is rebuilding his life. He still suffers some memory loss and frequent headaches stemming from the attack. He wants to eventually study business or international marketing and is proud of his 3.7 grade-point average at Los Angeles City College.

Aguilar can talk about his beating without a trace of emotion in his deliberate voice. But talking about the Henrys is another matter. Words cannot express his gratitude. Instead, he sobs.

And he puts his explanation to verse:

“On becoming senseless, I rapidly sank to the bottom

“Where wave after wave rocked me, demanding my whole life,

“And almost succeeded, were it not for a chivalrous lifesaver

“Who came to my rescue, grasped and lifted me out of such grip,

“As he, gentlemanly, succored me to a safer ground.

“That was how, miraculously, I got pulled out of the storm.”

Since the assault on Aguilar, the Henrys have more or less adopted him. They see one another often, and the Henrys have helped their quiet-spoken friend sort through the maze of red tape to enable him to get victim’s assistance.

“He’s like ours now,” Barbara Henry said. “I feel a great sense of responsibility. We kind of feel like it was our street. Our people. That we were responsible.”

Aguilar, who immigrated to the United States from Belize in 1970, knows the Henrys were responsible--but only for some of the good that came out of the riots.

For that reason, he said he phoned the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs about his idea. There is, however, no official record of his phone contact, city officials say.

Adolfo V. Nodal, general manager of the department, said a number of informal memorials, including murals and flowers, resulting from the riots have appeared throughout the city. Two other formal works are in the process of getting city approval.

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One memorial will be a 36-foot-high bronze and marble figure of a multiethnic woman standing on a globe in Kenneth Hahn State Park. Artist Nigel Bins says the statue will symbolize unity in Los Angeles and act as a welcome to immigrants moving here.

Artist Ayndrea Wilson says her monument, to be placed in a South-Central Los Angeles park, is intended to memorialize people killed in gang warfare. It will span 160 feet and consist of 12 X s that “reflect the dignity of the community and help in the healing process that began with the gang truce” between the Crips and Bloods gangs, which solidified as a result of the riots.

There are many avenues to getting a monument in place, including applying to the city for a grant or obtaining private funding, said Jane Kolb, public information officer for the Cultural Affairs Department.

“You need to have a solid proposal,” Kolb said. “My guess is (Aguilar’s) idea is a good one that should be discussed.”

Kolb suggested that Aguilar approach his City Council representative.

Aguilar, who admits he is not savvy to the ways of getting through a bureaucratic maze, says he will check with his City Council representative as soon as he gets through with his community college exams.

“This is my way of saying thanks to the people who helped not only me but who helped others,” he said. “I’m going to find a place for my memorial one way or the other.”