A Vivid Legacy for Children of the Riots

Noah Gentile likes to hear his mother tell the story of what happened the night he was born, how it was a night unlike any other.

Noah came into the world four years ago Monday as Los Angeles convulsed in violence after the not guilty verdicts for the white policemen accused of beating a black man named Rodney G. King.

The little boy doesn’t understand what a riot is. He does know his older brother, Gil, was born as a hurricane pounded Mexico and the Caribbean and it seems fitting to him that a major event took place at the time of his own birth. So the night of April 29, 1992, is part of Noah’s legacy. He is one of hundreds of babies born during the three days and nights that the city burned.

For Noah’s parents and others, who rushed to hospitals as rioting mobs torched buildings and beat motorists, a time that should have been indelibly marked by personal jubilation was poisoned by fear and bewilderment. For most of Southern California, the riots long ago faded. In these houses, it resurfaces with every birthday.

“It was hard to be elated that night, given everything that was going on,” said Noah’s mother, Karen Krygier. “Yes, I had a healthy baby, but my god, what was happening? It was so hard to watch the city go up in flames, yet I had something to counter that view. I had a personal joy that I couldn’t help but be affected by.”

To many parents whose babies were born during the riots, the children have become symbols of hope at a time when despair and frustration reached a crescendo. The ripples of the strange confluence of events are still playing out. One woman who was 8 1/2 months pregnant was shot in her belly. She delivered a healthy premature baby but continues to live in fear. Another mother, who experiences flashbacks to the shootings she witnessed in her native Nicaragua, longs to move out of state.

What all of them remember is how the riots turned an already hectic experience into a harrowing voyage through a city at war with itself. It was not a matter of reaching the hospital in time, but of getting there untouched by the violence.

New mothers, ordinarily the center of attention, waited as nurses and doctors anxiously whispered news to one another about what was transpiring beyond hospital walls. No one came to congratulate the new parents. No one sent flowers or balloons.

To Elvira Evers, 43, the birth of her daughter, Jessica, was one in a string of miracles that day.

On the fiery afternoon of April 30, the second day of the riots and a couple weeks before she was scheduled to give birth, Evers was shot in the abdomen while standing in the doorway of her Compton apartment, watching bands of looters make their way up Long Beach Boulevard.

Evers did not hear the crack of gunfire or feel its sting. But a 9-millimeter bullet had passed through the wall of her uterus and lodged in the right elbow of her unborn child, making Jessica the riots’ youngest gunshot victim.

Just seconds before the bullet struck, Evers said, another daughter, Lionela, then 5, had been clinging to her mother’s waist, right in the line of fire. Had Evers not pushed Lionela into the apartment, the child would have taken the bullet in the head.

Earlier in the day, Evers said, Jessica had repositioned herself, shifting heavily from right to left. Thus, the bullet barely grazed her elbow, leaving only a flesh wound that was closed by two stitches.

Also, had Evers not been pregnant, doctors told her, she likely would have died of a severed abdominal aorta.

But these miracles do not mitigate the fear that has dominated the single mother’s life since the riots. She fled Compton as quickly as she could, settling in an area of Gardena where the streets are quiet and there is a police station a block away. Still, she rarely leaves the house after dark, walks Lionela to and from school every day and tries her best to confine 14-year-old Marvin and 18-year-old Ahmad to the apartment when they are not in class. She wonders where she will send Jessica to nursery school; the nearest Head Start program is in Compton, and she won’t go near there.

Evers lectures her children constantly about the random dangers of the street.

“I don’t smoke or do no drugs and I was shot,” she said. “Bullets don’t know the difference. They have no eyes. They don’t know where they’re going.”

Jessica, a cheerful child with frilly hair ribbons, has only a tiny scar from her traumatic birth. She likes to show visitors newspaper clippings about the day she was born.

Evers worked as a cashier in the McDonnell Douglas cafeteria until Jessica’s birth, but has stayed at home since, on public assistance.

“I don’t leave her with nobody--with nobody,” she said, emphatically. “I owe her that because she saved my life.”

A Name of Hope

It is a family joke that when Noah and Gil’s parents have a baby, a major event shakes the world.

Gil, now 7, was born in Los Angeles as Hurricane Gilbert--the biggest storm recorded in the Western Hemisphere--pounded the Caribbean and Mexico, killing at least 260 and causing billions of dollars in damage. Noah was born about 12 hours after the beginning of the riots, which claimed the lives of more than 50 people and caused $1 billion in property damage.

Noah’s parents reached Good Samaritan Hospital west of Downtown shortly after crowds had gathered ominously at Parker Center in the hours after a jury in Simi Valley acquitted three LAPD officers accused of beating King and could not reach a verdict on the fourth.

At first, the Hancock Park couple kept the television on in Krygier’s hospital room.

“Here I was in labor, trying to breathe through contractions, and instead of music, we had the riots on,” said Krygier, then a commercial real estate lender.

Her husband, Ralph Gentile, found it distracting. “Let’s concentrate on having our child and forget about the outside world,” he told his wife.

After nine hours of labor, Krygier delivered a 7-pound boy. The couple had discussed several potential names. But in the early morning hours, as smoke and flames enveloped portions of the city, those seemed inappropriate. Suddenly, the couple came up with a name from the Bible that fit the baby and the occasion of his birth: Noah, a righteous man chosen by God to perpetuate the human race.

“It felt like a sign to have a baby during that time,” Krygier said. “I couldn’t help but feel a lot of optimism. Here was this new person coming into the world.”

Friends later teased the couple, coming up with other possibilities. What about naming the baby Rodney? Or Daryl (after the then-police chief)? Or Denny (after the truck driver beaten to a bloody pulp as a TV helicopter broadcast live)?

Having settled on a name and eager to check on Gil, Ralph, then 36, ventured from the hospital about 5:30 a.m. He entered an almost-surreal world. Sidewalks shimmered with broken glass. A huge fire billowed in a building on 6th Street. There were no firefighters, no police.

Gentile changed routes. Perhaps, he thought, this had not been such a good idea--a white man driving a white BMW along empty, ravaged streets. At his usual gas station on 3rd Street, Gentile saw the first signs of life: Several mechanics standing guard with hunting rifles.

From his apartment on the edge of Koreatown, Gentile could see buildings in flames against the hazy morning sky. He had intended to shower, change and return to the hospital. Instead, he filled the tub with water, thinking it would be useful if he had to put out a fire. And he stayed home with his mother-in-law and son.

Krygier remained at the hospital, watching the riots on TV and looking into Noah’s tiny face.

“How are we going to come back from this?” she wondered. “How did it get to this point? And how are we going to find the answers?”

Over the four years since, Krygier has watched friends leave Los Angeles. She has watched the rebuilding. After a lot of soul-searching, she and her husband, an architect, bought a house in Hancock Park. They were staying. This is home.

Today, Krygier ponders the best way to explain to her sons what happened on the night of Noah’s birth.

“People were very angry and frustrated,” she told them. “When people are angry, they can do things that maybe they wouldn’t ordinarily do.”

Noah peered at her, wide-eyed.

“Yes, but why were they so angry?” he asked.

That question is harder for her to answer.

Terrifying Flashbacks

Like so many immigrants before her, Sylvia Lilliana Rodriguez came to the U.S. from Nicaragua hoping for a better life.

Her husband, Ricardo, arrived in Los Angeles several months before she did. A former air traffic controller, he got a job as a manager at a Church’s Fried Chicken restaurant. He wrote often, describing his purchases in anticipation of the couple’s first baby. He’d gotten a stuffed bear, baby shoes, T-shirts and a stroller.

Here, he wrote his wife, it was possible to buy poultry without waiting five hours in line. Here, it was possible to earn enough money to buy shoes.

Shortly after Sylvia Rodriguez reached Los Angeles seven years ago, she stopped having her terrible nightmares, dreams of dead bodies piled on the beach, some face up, some face down, casualties of the civil war. At 27, she finally felt safe. She got a job working as a cashier at a McDonald’s.

Bit by bit, though, the feeling of safety began to erode. Her husband was shot in the groin during a robbery at his restaurant. Sylvia, a petite 5-foot-2, was repeatedly harassed by men on the street in her neighborhood between Koreatown and South Central. She thwarted a pair trying to carjack her by screaming for help in a parking lot.

Pregnant with the couple’s second child, Rodriguez was unaware of the King beating trial or the impending verdict when she and her husband reached County USC Medical Center on the morning of April 29. At 3:15 p.m., the jury brought in its verdict.

That evening, after Rodriguez gave birth to a girl, Lilieth Stephanie, the couple realized chaos had erupted around them.

In Rodriguez’s room, five other women--each with her own new baby--chattered anxiously about what was happening outside. One woman, who lived near Rodriguez, said her eldest son had been beaten and her teenage son’s face had been cut by rioters. As plumes of smoke wafted past their window, another woman feared rioters would soon burn down the hospital.

“When it should have been a happy moment, it was sad,” Rodriguez said. “The violence and burning of buildings, that’s the way it started in Nicaragua. I thought it would turn into a revolution, that the police wouldn’t have enough control to contain it.”

Ever since, Rodriguez has waited for Los Angeles to erupt again. Earlier this month, when she saw a televised videotape of Latino immigrants being pulled from their truck and beaten by Riverside County sheriff’s deputies, she stocked her home with bottled water and canned goods. She and her two children stayed inside, waiting for the city’s unrest to spill into the street.

Lilieth, a shy child whose dark hair cascades beyond her shoulders, seems untouched by her mother’s concerns.

Rodriguez has begun to talk to her husband about moving to Maryland, where her parents live.

“I have more fear now,” she said. “Because I know what could happen.”

Chaos Like Saigon

With each candle she lights on her son’s birthday cake, Tammy Ngo thinks of the fire and rage that ignited the city on the night he was born.

“I still have nightmares of that day,” the 41-year-old West Covina hairdresser said.

Steven’s birth remains a vivid, powerful memory with a punch so strong she cannot describe the event without her voice quavering.

As she and her husband, Tim Tran, headed for the hospital on the evening of April 29, Ngo saw looters dodging between cars and rioters setting vehicles and buildings ablaze. Drivers skittered in the lanes, skirting angry mobs.

Ngo and Tran, the driver, got stuck in traffic for 90 minutes on the Hollywood Freeway. She wondered if she’d give birth to her son in the car. And she wondered what kind of world she was bringing her child into. When Ngo finally reached Kaiser-Permanente Medical Center in Hollywood, she waited in the labor room and wondered whether the riots would be a curse on her baby’s life.

“I wasn’t sure if the baby would be bad luck or something,” she said, chuckling in the Pasadena hair salon where she currently works. “But now when I look at my son, I’m happy. Despite all the fear and violence that that we went through that night, I still had a live and healthy baby.”

The riots reminded Ngo of the panic in her native Vietnam when Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975. Before she left for the hospital, Ngo watched the live coverage of the riots on television. “We had already fled Vietnam [in 1988] for America, the most powerful and best country in the world,” she said. “But at that moment, and all this was happening, I remember thinking I might have to flee another country again. I was scared.”

At 4:10 p.m. on April 30, Ngo’s first child was born. He was almost 8 pounds.

Each time she passes by the hospital, she can still see the terrifying chaos of that fateful night. She doesn’t always feel safe, but she is not short of optimism.

“I hope it never, never will happen again,” she said. “When Steven’s old enough, I will tell him what happened. I want him to grow to be a good person and understand his surrounding so that he can live in a safe world.”

Racism Hits Home

Eva Ohman-Benjamin and Daniel Benjamin spent the weekend of the riots helping to clean debris from South-Central Los Angeles.

That Monday, the Benjamins, who had tried for years to have a baby, received a call from their adoption agency: A black infant, born at 1 a.m. the day before, was available. The white Santa Monica couple did not hesitate.

It happened so quickly, at such a confusing time, yet they could not help but think they were making some small contribution to the world.

“Is this a phoenix rising from the ashes?” Eva wondered as they rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “We felt it was the beginning of something better.”

Today, the Benjamins are parents of a chubby boy who speaks both English and his mother’s native Swedish.

Eva, who emigrated two decades ago, and Daniel find themselves looking at race far more personally.

“Racist remarks, stereotypes, are no longer something you sit over wine and argue about,” Eva said. “It’s not just in the head now; it’s in the heart.”

They believed the riots would be a blessing in disguise, a wedge that would open dialogue between the races and smooth the sharp edges of life. But with time came forgetfulness.

“For a while this city was forced to talk about this invisible monster,” Eva said. “It’s something we ought to remember and not put in the past, or it’s wasted.”

Daniel looked glum. “It seems pretty well wasted to me,” he said.

Times staff writers Tina Nguyen and Peter Y. Hong contributed to this story.