Comatose Victim of Riots Is Eclipsed by Denny Case : Unrest: Street evangelist warned looters they would go to hell. Trial in beating is set for end of year.

He is the last riot victim still hospitalized, a man in a coma whose beating remains an obscure counterpoint to the televised assault of trucker Reginald O. Denny.

While Denny’s assault was witnessed by millions, only a few dozen watched as Wallace Tope, a street evangelist, was beaten as he was preaching to looters in Hollywood. Now, as the city anxiously awaits the outcome of the Denny trial, the Tope case is largely forgotten.

“Wally is as much a symbol of the violence of the riots as Reginald Denny,” said Regina Sipple, Tope’s longtime friend. “But everyone knows about Denny . . . and no one seems to care about Wally Tope.”

Tope, 54, languishes in a North Hollywood convalescent hospital, taking his meals through a tube and air from a ventilator. He probably will never regain consciousness, his doctors say. Tope is one of more than 2,000 people who were injured in the riots, and one of more than 200 who were critically injured. But at least his two suspected attackers--who will go on trial at the end of the year--were apprehended. In dozens of other brutal assaults and killings during the riots, which took 53 lives, the assailants never have been caught.

After Tope was attacked, police were mystified as to why a white evangelist would venture into a riot and preach to looters. But Tope’s friends knew he had a history of embarking on dangerous evangelical missions. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he smuggled Bibles into the Soviet Union and Christian literature into countries throughout Eastern Europe. He once attempted to proselytize a group of armed soldiers in East Germany, where he was later arrested.

He was not interested in preaching from the insulated confines of a pulpit, friends said. That is why he dropped out of a theological seminary years ago: He wanted to be out on the streets, communing with people he felt needed help the most.

When the riots began, and Tope saw people looting and burning on television, he told friends that those were the ones he wanted to reach. The next day, he approached a number of friends at William Carey International University, a Christian college in Pasadena. But none agreed to accompany him to riot areas.

When they tried to persuade him that the danger was too great, he countered with a biblical quotation from Jesus:

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. . . . I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance.”

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Tope headed to Hollywood in his battered 12-year-old car with the bumper sticker: “God Does Not Grade on the Curve.” He began passing out religious pamphlets at a shopping center near Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue, where there was extensive looting. This was one of his regular corners, where he liked to preach because of the challenge of debating the various religious sects that also gathered there.

After looters broke into a drugstore, Tope stood by the door and tried to dissuade them. He was assaulted after the following series of events, according to court records that include statements of witnesses and police officers:

Tope confronted one man, Fidel Ortiz, and thrust a pamphlet at him entitled “Hell: Suppose It’s True After All.” Tope told him to repent and warned that he would go to hell if he continued looting. Ortiz threatened and punched Tope, who hurriedly left the area and began walking through the parking lot toward his car.

A friend of Ortiz’s, Leonard Sosa, saw the confrontation from a distance, ran across the parking lot and attacked Tope. Then Sosa and Ortiz beat and kicked Tope for several minutes.

“This wasn’t some hit-and-run type thing,” said Los Angeles Detective Ernie Basset, who investigated the beating. “They really thumped on this guy for awhile.”

A bystander flagged down an ambulance and the attendants found Tope, battered and bloody, still clutching his Gospel tracts. He immediately began proselytizing an attendant, telling him: “Believe in Jesus for your Salvation.” On the way to the hospital, he said softly: “God Bless You,” then fell into a coma and never regained consciousness.

Tope suffered severe head injuries and remains in a “persistent vegetative state,” his doctors say.

Sosa and Ortiz, who both worked as warehousemen for a concessionaire at Dodger Stadium, were arrested a few weeks later after co-workers overheard them bragging about the beating, Basset said. They are being held on $750,000 bail and are charged with attempted murder and aggravated mayhem.

While the Denny defendants, who are black, have said they were victims of discriminatory prosecution because of unreasonably high bail and excessive criminal charges, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti noted that the bail on Sosa and Ortiz, who are Latino, is higher. And like the defendants in the Denny trial, Sosa and Ortiz also are charged with crimes that carry possible life sentences.

But Marvin L. Part, who represents Sosa, rejects the comparison with the Denny defendants. Ortiz, 21, was watching television with Sosa, 24, his girlfriend and their baby when they discovered that a shopping center a few blocks away was being looted, Part said.

They walked over to a drugstore and Sosa stole a box of Pampers and Baby Wipes. When he noticed that Ortiz was involved in a confrontation with Tope, Part said, “he went over to help his friend.”

“These two guys did not go to a certain intersection to start a riot,” Part said. “They are two working guys who had never been in trouble with the law before . . . who were involved in actions that are still not entirely clear . . . who had a momentary lapse of rationality.”

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Time froze for Tope on the second day of the riots, but he has not been forgotten by those he met on evangelical trips. He receives about 30 cards and letters a month from people throughout the world.

On a recent evening, his friend Victor Marquis, who visits him every week along with a few others, brought Tope the latest batch of mail.

There was a card and a $25 check from Idaho (“I am sure God is blessing you”); a letter from Nevada (“Just wanted you to know you are not forgotten”); a postcard from North Carolina (“I have been helped very much by your ministry.”) and a letter from Ghana (“May the one who never slumbers watch over you day and night.”)

Marquis read the mail and played a few cassettes recorded by Tope’s friends. But Tope, wearing a thin hospital nightgown, could not respond. He just breathed fitfully and stared off into space, his eyes rheumy and opaque.

Tope’s brother, Dennis, visited the hospital on another afternoon and, fighting back tears, recalled the night he learned about the beating. Police asked him to visit the hospital and identify his brother.

“His face was so badly beaten I couldn’t even recognize him. I prayed it wasn’t him. Then they brought his wallet and I had to accept it. . . . If Wally doesn’t get through this and he dies in the hospital, I know one thing,” he said, tears streaming down his face: “If anyone makes it to heaven, it will be my brother.”

During the first night of rioting, Tope’s mother, Helen, warned him to stay away. She had a premonition he would be drawn to areas of danger.

“He always wanted to go where he thought people needed help,” she said. “So when I saw the rioting break out on television I called him and asked him not to go. But he didn’t say anything. If I’d made him promise, he wouldn’t have gone. But I didn’t. . . . How I wish now that I’d made him promise.”

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Tope grew up in La Canada Flintridge and studied electronic engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. After graduating, he returned to Southern California and began working as a computer programmer for a defense contractor.

After about two years, he announced to his family that he was quitting to devote his life to religion, Dennis Tope said. He had become a born-again Christian at college and over the years became increasingly consumed by religion.

“The family wanted him to pursue his career, but he told us he wasn’t interested in material things anymore,” Dennis Tope said. “He wanted to devote his life to Christ and save people.”

After dropping out of theological school because he thought the program was too confining, he moved to a small studio apartment near Pasadena’s William Carey International University. He ate most of his meals at the school’s cafeteria and became friendly with students and staff members who also were born-again Christians.

Tope led a monastic existence, holing up all night in his apartment, researching and writing his religious tracts. He slept in the morning and then spent the rest of the day studying, talking religion with friends or preaching on street corners. When he saved enough money selling Gospel tracts, he would embark on an evangelical trip.

Tope often focused on religions or movements he thought violated the teachings of the Bible and wrote tracts railing against Scientologists, Hare Krishnas and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. But whether he was criticizing tenets of the Mormon religion at Brigham Young University, where he was slugged by a student, or railing against Scientology in Hollywood, “he never acted like a kook . . . the type who’d yell that the world was ending,” Marquis said. Tope was a well-educated man who passed out the religious tracts he wrote and attempted to engage passersby in conversations about Christianity.

Still, in the Pasadena evangelical community Tope represented a more extreme fringe. He would endure greater risks than the other believers, travel farther and confront more hostile crowds.

Although Tope would go to almost any lengths to promulgate his views, he had a great capacity for forgiveness, friends say. And that is why during every visit to the hospital, after his friends pray for Tope, they also pray for the two men who beat him.

“If there is a miracle and Wally ever regains consciousness, I know he’d try to meet those two men,” Marquis said. “And I’m sure the first thing he’d do, after bringing them some of his religious writings, would be to witness to them.”