Chris Harris; Award-Winning TV Journalist

Chris Harris, whose arduous gavel-to-gavel coverage of the first Rodney G. King beating trial helped KTTV win Peabody and duPont Columbia awards for community service while making him Broadcast Journalist of the Year for the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, has died.

He was 51 when he died Wednesday night at his Newbury Park home of a heart condition that first became dramatically evident in June, 1992, when he suffered an attack while on the air for “Fox News at 10.” The anchorman underwent quadruple-bypass surgery but later returned to the air and most recently had been a senior correspondent.

At the time of the attack his doctors speculated that his two-month, 16-hour-a-day coverage of the King trial had contributed to his health problems.

But he said after the trial that the ordeal “was the high point of my career. I wouldn’t change any of the stuff I did or we did.”

Awards were not new for Harris, even before his work on the King case.

He was nominated for a local Emmy for coverage of the Universal Studios fire in 1990 and again for KTTV’s team coverage of the 1993 Southland blazes. As a reporter he had won two Los Angeles Emmys for spot news reporting on a 1985 schoolyard shooting and the 1987 Cerritos plane crash. He also earned Golden Mike awards for documentaries dealing with drug trafficking and a five-part series on transvestites.

He also covered the John DeLorean drug trafficking case and the McMartin child molestation trials.

He joined KTTV in 1981 as a reporter and anchored the weeknight Fox news from November, 1990, to May, 1993. Earlier he had worked for KHJ Channel 9 (now KCAL) in Los Angeles, winning two Emmy awards there for best news reporting.

He came to Los Angeles from Sacramento, where he had worked for two TV stations.

Harris told The Times in 1992 that local news was “the most fun . . . it’s where you really connect with a community because you’re part of it. . . . I invest in the community and the community invests in me.”

Survivors include his wife, Martha, three sons and his mother.