L.A. Remembers

Ten years have passed since Los Angeles erupted in reaction to the verdicts in the Rodney King police brutality trial. Almost anyone old enough to remember those five chaotic days in the spring of 1992 has a tale to tell--of anger, of fear, of awakening, of transformation. Here, 32 people interviewed by Times staffers talk about what they’ll never forget.

‘It was just very scary’

Rian Williams, 24, is the education services coordinator at A Place Called Home, a South-Central community center that mentors youth through the arts. She grew up in South-Central and was a ninth-grader at John Adams Middle School at the time of the riots.

When the verdict was released, we were across the street from school, in front of the YMCA. There was a group of us outside playing, and one of the girls’ mother came by and said, “You all need to go in the house and watch TV.” When I got home, the TV was on, and I saw the fires and stuff. It was really scary. It hadn’t gotten to our immediate community yet.

Time passed, and we stood on the porch and you could see the thick smoke and the orange and the grayish colors from all the fires. It happened so quickly. It was like a chain reaction.

The scariest thing I remember is walking and seeing the [trucks] coasting down Central Avenue--a lot of them. They had the National Guard with the helmets, the fatigues, the guns and everything. It was the scariest thing to see them marching around stone-faced.

On San Pedro and Adams, there was a shopping center, and there were people breaking into stores and setting fires. It was just very scary. I remember going with my friends and one of my uncles to one of the shopping centers, and [someone] said, “Get down, I’m going to shoot the lock off.” They went in the store--it was a flower shop--and took baskets and things. We just stared. We were just tagging along, but I was thinking “My grandma’s gonna kill me.”

People were taking clothes, radios, everything. But I knew it wasn’t going to change the verdicts to grab a TV. It wouldn’t justify anything for me. I just remember being very numb and watching everything. There was so much chaos. It’s hard not to think about it because I still work here and live here. You still see a lot of the remains, places that have not been rebuilt, empty lots with rubbish piled up. It’s a joke. You hear officials talking about community development. Hello! We could use a bookstore, a library, a few schools, a day-care center, a medical facility.

It changed the way that I saw people. Being 14, you’re really naive still. To see what anger and frustration and oppression can bring about, that gave me a greater awareness of where I wanted to be in my life. I wanted to make circumstances in my life that were positive, where I wouldn’t feel that type of frustration. Back then, I understood why people did the things they did. But now, I don’t feel an oppressed, frustrated people should be justified in behaving that way.

‘And then the bricks flying’

Tony Wafford, 45, is the community advisory board chair for the HIV Prevention Trials Network in Los Angeles. In 1992, he was a publicist and lived in Whittier.

I went over to the barbershop around noon. It’s at Florence and Hobart. It was business as usual. People talking. Socializing. There was talk about the verdict. I didn’t really feel too much. I knew, “That’s the way it goes.” The older people came in there who really believed in truth and justice and the American way and suffered through Jim Crow. The reality hit them.

Then all of a sudden, we were watching all hell breaking loose. We literally saw it. We saw the police cars going east on Florence and then the bricks flying. Then the police cars headed back west. My friend Lawrence and myself went down there, and I’ll never forget there was a Hispanic couple in a Volvo and the crowd thought they were white. People started throwing bricks and attacking them. I told Lawrence, who is light-skinned, that he better get a Kufi [African hat] so people will know he’s black. We go back to the barbershop and see the Denny thing on TV. So we go back, and there’s Reginald on his side. Bleeding like a dog.

‘Everything just escalates’

Margie Hernandez, 45, a consultant for nonprofit organizations, lives in Whittier. She was at work at Warner Bros. in Burbank when the verdicts were announced and protests soon began. She and her co-workers were told to go home.

Back then I had a particular interest in the Rodney King trial because a co-worker and her husband, a retired LAPD sergeant, were close friends with Larry Powell, one of the officers on trial. When the verdict was announced my co-worker friend was happy because the police officers were acquitted. She was ecstatic!

I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, my God, what’s going to happen?’ I thought back to the Watts riots of ’65 when I was 8 years old, living in Azusa and seeing that on television and praying for that to never happen again.

When we were told to leave work and go straight home, well, at that moment I thought: “This is going to be worse than 1965,” especially with instantaneous news. Everybody knew what was happening; and in a way, that’s good because you are aware of what’s going on. But, in a way, that also fuels events and everything just escalates so much quicker.

It took me four hours to get home in what otherwise would have been a 40-minute drive. And that really made the fear real and made me believe there is a clear and present danger in this city. And you don’t know what you are going home to.

The riots really forced me to understand we are one people of many communities and we all need to be treated with respect no matter what the circumstances. I think if we do that in all areas--business, politics, relationships--then we will have peace in our communities, our families, our workplace. We learned that everyone has a voice and everyone’s voice needs to be heard. When you try to stifle a voice, you may not hear it, but later on it will be a shout. And that’s exactly what happened on April 29, 1992--a shout.

‘She didn’t care about our lives’

Cliseria Pineda’s hands look dry and worn from more than two decades of work as a single-needle-machine operator in the downtown garment district. The day the riots began, she was working at a factory on 12th and San Julian, where the Mexican immigrant, now 42, sewed for a contractor making clothes for Forever 21.

All the other factories were shut down because people were burning them. But my factory boss wouldn’t shut down. I could smell smoke. I could hear sirens and firetrucks. I was really afraid. I saw people running around and grabbing stuff out of buildings. I called my family and told them not to go out. We tried to talk to the owner and tell her to shut down, but she refused. I worked a full day.

I realized that, to this owner, I was nothing. She didn’t care about our lives, she just cared about the work.

‘I don’t feel I could judge anyone’

Carol Sauvion, now 54, was living in Hollywood when the Rodney King verdict was delivered, less than three months after her husband unexpectedly died. The widow was left to manage a growing arts-and-crafts store, Freehand, on West 3rd Street near the Beverly Center, and her 7-year-old son, Noah.

My son was in that phase of Inspector Gadget at the time. He had asked for a trench coat for his birthday. He was wearing his trench coat. When he found out about the riots, we went home and he put on an army helmet, and he had this Daisy BB gun. He took the gun, and he went and stood on our front porch. He knew there was a riot.

Later, we were made aware that some children were having trauma about it. He had already had a trauma because his father passed away of a heart attack in front of his eyes. He was still dealing with that. I remember saying to him later on that children were having nightmares about it. I asked, ‘Noah, are you all right about it? Was it hard for you? Are you afraid? [He said,] ‘No, Mom. I was working the whole time.’ He had a sense that he was protecting us somehow. He felt more in control and less fearful because of that.

I don’t feel that I could judge anyone for what they did that day. I think that I felt the anger that other people felt and the injustice that other people felt that day.

‘We formed a human chain’

Eddie Miles, 51, is a contractor who owns Interfaith 3, a firm that remodels houses in South Los Angeles. For years he has worked as a security guard at First AME Church in South-Central L.A., where the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray is pastor.

I was 15 years old in the Los Angeles riots of ’65. The night the ’92 riot started, I knew something was terribly wrong. I went to the church to be around Pastor Chip Murray, learn from him. I knew he’d say things, and people would listen.

There were already dozens of people in the church; it was still daylight. Two blocks from there, on Adams Boulevard, a crowd was about to destroy a liquor store. We went down and saw a line of riot police. They were nervous. We wanted to keep the police from killing people. My mission was to protect Chip Murray. My job was to get him in and out of there safely.

We formed a human chain in front of the police. We didn’t want them to start shooting. Standing in front of people trying to prevent a riot is insanity. From a distance, someone threw a brick and hit me in the head. It took the skin off most of my forehead. I remember saying, “I can’t see.” They dragged me back to the church and bandaged me up. Someone said they saw the guy who threw the brick. He was aiming at the police.

By the time I got back outside, they were setting fires. The liquor store, an apartment building, a furniture store about 500 yards from the church. The Fire Department wasn’t there yet. I remember a lot of smoke, a lot of sirens, the smell of things burning. The moon didn’t shine. It was eerie.

I tried to talk to four or five guys. They were so enraged. I told them, “We don’t want to relive ’65. We can’t tear down our own community.” I remember what it was like in ’65. We couldn’t get food or basic services.

But it was too late to stop them, stop what everybody was going to have to experience and the conditions that would follow. I felt tremendously disappointed and filled with anxiety.

Afterward, my feelings shifted from disappointment to wanting to help the people who had survived.

When I see that kind of rage, on news reports, I can feel the danger again. I watch news about the Middle East, and I know what that feels like.

‘It was just a madness’

Navraj Singh, 53, owner of India’s Oven restaurants in Los Angeles and West L.A., had a restaurant on Pico Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue that was burned down during the riots. He was returning from a visit to India and was on a plane from London to Los Angeles when the captain told the passengers the city was under siege.

Little did I know that when the captain told us what was happening, my restaurant was burning. It was shocking to know there were riots in Los Angeles. I didn’t think the area we were in was ripe for destruction. When we landed, we were told that there was a curfew in the city, and we could not go home.

The next morning I went to the site, and there was nothing left. I felt terrible. I was devastated. But it was not the end of the world, you know. I had a very talented, dedicated staff, and I had told them we would pick up the threads from here. I bought another business and moved there a month later.

I was not angry at the people who did this, because I knew that their anger was not directed at me. It was just a madness that was going on in the city, and we became part of the madness. I’m a very peaceful man, and I thought, whatever God has done, it’s going to be better for me, and by the grace of God, I’m doing fantastically.

We live in the best country in the world. You can be whatever you want to be. Those people who are unsatisfied have to go out and see what is outside this country and realize what we have here. It’s like heaven on earth.

‘This is about feeling desperate’

Defense attorney Angela Oh, 47, was socially active 10 years ago but catapulted to prominence after the riots. She still practices law and lectures on race relations to corporations, nonprofits and students. On the day after the verdicts came down, she drove to the office of John Lim, then-president of the Korean-American Bar Assn.

On 8th Street, I saw all of these people, and they weren’t African Americans. They were mostly Latinos. Young people. Old people. Men. Women. Pregnant women. Running out of the local grocery store with stuff, and this wasn’t electronics and televisions. It was sort of poignant. Because the stuff that people had in their arms were things like dishwashing soap and diapers and cereal and dish racks. I mean, these were the working poor. These were not people looking to get high-end merchandise into their homes. I remember seeing a pregnant woman, with a child in tow, carrying cereal. And then I saw young men picking up bricks and just heaving them at glass-paned windows, and I’m thinking to myself, this is really not about the justice system. This is about people feeling desperate in general.

The fact of this verdict is really just the last piece that people could take. It was different from ‘65, where the racial injustice was so apparent. Here, it was the economic injustice and desperation. I mean, you didn’t see just black against white. It was a multiracial, multicultural, intergenerational mess that occurred. The system broke down.

One thing that we do understand now in 2002 is that when the demographics begin to shift in such a dramatic way, it has other implications for institutions, for policy, for how people are going to conduct themselves in a community.

Yes, the tensions may rise, but opportunities to learn also rise. What is the missing factor? Trust. And so who is responsible for developing that kind of trust in the community? All of us.

‘Somebody hit me in the face’

Julia Sandidge, 43, was a TV news reporter in Minneapolis when the riots broke out. While covering the story there, she was struck in the face and kicked in the head. It was two months before she could walk, a year before she could return to work. Sandidge, who is married to Times reporter Duane Noriyuki and lives in Crestline, Calif., is pursuing a teaching career.

We had just seen the riot coverage in Los Angeles [and] were told something similar could happen in Minneapolis because of this angry tension between cops and the black communities.

My initial reaction was that the lead of the story would be that the cops were sitting in their cars and not doing anything to stop the violence. But the next thing I knew, a group of kids had swarmed my colleague [photographer Rod Wermager] and started kicking him.

I just ran in screaming, “Stop it.” I’m not sure what I thought I was going to do, but I ran into the middle of the fighting. Somebody hit me in the face. I thought I had gotten hit with a brick.

I never was able to report objectively after that. I could never separate myself from the victims that I covered. Ultimately, I think it was the reason I had to leave TV news.

I don’t think I’ve ever fully recovered from that head injury, and that affects different parts of my life. I’m not as ambitious as I was. I’ll never have the confidence I had before that. I can never separate myself from the suffering I see in other people the way I could before that day. And I think that’s a good thing.

‘A white girl! Get them!’

Lydia Ramos, 32, is a first-year English and journalism teacher at Banning High School in Los Angeles. The Long Beach resident worked as an NBC news producer in New York and L.A. before returning to her former high school to teach. In 1992 she had just graduated from USC and was a reporter for the Wave, a community newspaper in South-Central.

April 29, 1992--that’s a day I’ll never forget. My assignment was to cover the happenings outside the First AME Church. But I wanted to have a camera with me, so I went home to Long Beach to pick it up. My mother was home. She knew I was going back into the fray. She gave me a hug like it was the last time she was ever going to see me.

By the time I arrived at the church, there were hundreds of people outside, upset because they could not get in. They started shouting, “No justice! No peace! No justice! No peace!” They marched in the streets. I went along. And then the people started shouting, “Let’s take this to Beverly Hills! Let’s take this to Westwood! That’s where we need to be!”

Then something clicked. These guys in a truck jumped onto parked cars and started bashing in cars. Others tried to loot a liquor store and a furniture store. At that moment it was either fight or flight. The outside rally became a riot. I’m seeing people run past me. I talk to them. They tell me, “This is not why I came. I’m not a part of this.”

I ran back to the church. I knew it was dangerous out there, and I didn’t want to walk to my car alone. I saw a black couple going in the direction I was headed and asked, “Do you mind if I walk part ways with you to my car?” “No problem,” the guy said.

A tall man stops us and asks, “Is she with you? Watch out for her, protect her because when you round this corner they’re going to get her.”

We joined arms and introduced ourselves. “I’m Lydia Ramos. Hi, my name is Janice. My name is Greg.” As we rounded the corner people started yelling, “White girl! White girl! Get them! They’ve got a white girl! Get them!”

Looters started chasing us. And we’re running, running, running. Then from an alley these two boys, about 14 years old, stop us. One asks, “Are you coming from the church?” We’re about to say yes, but before we can even say that, he pulls a gun from the back of his trousers and points it straight to the front of my head. He says, “If you are not coming from the church, you are going to get filled with lead.”

At that point I could not defend myself. My skin was not black. That night in that neighborhood I was the enemy.

Greg said, “We’re coming from the church, man. We’re down. We’re down. Please don’t shoot us! Please! Just please let us get back to our car. We mean no harm. We went to the church service, and now we’re just trying to get back to our car. Please, just calm down.”

The kid kept saying I shouldn’t be there. He let us go, and we’re running, running, running away from a teenager with a gun pointed to our backs. We got to Greg’s and Janice’s car, and I crouched in the front passenger’s seat until we made it to my car. I made it home, and my mother hugged me like I had never been hugged before.

I was so angry after that experience. I was ashamed about what we had done to Rodney King, what we had done to the justice system and what we had done to ourselves. This is my city. This is where I was born, where my mother was born, where I was raised. I own this city as much as anybody else. I remember how betrayed I felt. I was threatened with my life because of the color of my skin.

The riots certainly changed my life and also the focus of my career. Sometimes you don’t know your calling until it comes calling on you. I came back to the very classroom where I once sat as a student. I pursued my dream job--to give back to the community--and here I am, one little part of the solution.

Every day I might be the only adult who is the positive role model in the lives of 125 kids, the only one who says, “Hello, how are you doing?”

It’s hard to explain what you learn from having a gun put to your head. But I’m not going to teach my kids the kind of hate I experienced that night. That’s not the way to live in L.A.

‘I jumped into the bushes!’

Jervey Tervalon, 43, is the author of the novels “Dead Above Ground” and “Understand This.” He teaches at UCLA’s Center for African American Studies and at Cal State L.A. and is the Remsen Bird writer-in-residence at Occidental College. He was born in New Orleans and lives in Altadena.

I decided I was going to go out and walk my dog even though my wife had told me, “Jervey! People are rioting in the streets! Things are getting out of hand. Don’t walk that dog!” I decided that nothing’s going to happen. We’re in Pasadena. So I took my stick, my cayenne pepper spray and told her, “Not to worry, my dear. I’ll be back shortly.”

Then I walk down from our working-class neighborhood toward the more affluent area near the Rose Bowl. All of a sudden I hear a gunshot. Then a series of gunshots. Then I get nervous because the gunshots continue to echo. It’s automatic gunfire. And I see trucks and lowriders driving up to the neighborhood where I’m walking. I grabbed the dog--about 70 pounds--and jumped into the bushes! Waiting. They never come. When I work up enough nerve, I started walking toward the house. I saw a woman outside, working on her car, and I said in my best inner-city patois, “Fools shootin’ up the Rose Bowl.” She said, ‘I told them fools not to do that. I told them, say your prayers and mind your business.’”

‘I was in the middle of a shootout’

Ron Salisbury, 69, owns El Cholo, a Mexican restaurant on Western Avenue. He was at a Dodger game when rioting broke out, and he decided to check the restaurant, opened in 1927 by his grandparents.

When I got to the restaurant, the rioters weren’t in our area, but it made sense to get everybody out and safely home. We were closed for seven days after that. I spent my waking hours watching the restaurant or driving around to see what was going on. A mini-mall down the street was looted and burned down. I watched people attacking stores, jumping through windows, loading up their arms, laughing like it was a big party. Their cars were triple-parked on the street.

I stopped by a Korean merchant’s store to ask the security guard if he could guard my restaurant. He was carrying a rifle. All of a sudden he said, “Drop!” A bunch of looters were running toward us. I was in the middle of a shootout.

For some reason the looters hopped over my restaurant. It was like a fire that jumps over one spot and starts up somewhere else. Western between Pico and Olympic was saved.

Every day we took meals to the firefighters. I felt so close to those guys and the police. They really helped. Then I started to see how the police were demoralized. I wanted to send a message that I appreciated them.

When the restaurant finally opened, we held a contest. Buy a raffle ticket, if you win you can own El Cholo for a day. The police chief had suggested getting computers for their offices. But I was driving home one night and saw a squad car pass by. I thought, now that’s sexy. We used the money from the raffle to buy a squad car.

I understand myself better because of the riots. You never know how you’ll react to something like that. I want to experience as much of life as possible.

‘My brother’s business burned’

Jong Min Kang, 43, is a business owner and president of the Korean American Business Assn. He led a volunteer security patrol known as the Korean Young Adult Team of Los Angeles. Armed and wearing white headbands, they tried to protect Korean-owned businesses. By the third day of rioting, the group had 450 members.

Dark sky, dark sky, dark sky from the fires. A lot of people were crying. So many people stole from stores, no police. Many people who came to America with very little money and worked hard to start businesses lost everything in one night. My brother’s business burned. He went back to Korea. I lost my brother, I lost friends.

Many children watched their parents’ businesses burn. If you lost your business or if someone made a fire at your parents’ store, a lot of people remember. They remember for their parents.

‘You could feel the electricity’

Nobuko Miyamoto, 62, is a third-generation Japanese American and founder/artistic director of Great Leap, a multicultural arts organization in L.A. Miyamoto, whose 28-year-old son is half African American, recorded a song, “The Chasm,” in 1997 that addresses her experience during the riots:

“Driving my car through the war zone, I stop at a light.

A young black man looks at me,

Fire in his eyes.

He sees in me the enemy.

No time to say,

‘Hey, I loved Malcolm,’

Or ‘You could be my son.’”

That day there were about six fires around here, and we were ready to get on the roof because the wind was blowing. A couple days later me and my friend got in her truck, and she had a camera, and of all stupid things we drove down to South-Central, to the place where it started and people were really hostile.

You could feel the electricity in the air. We were stupid to have a camera. We were shooting because I was preparing to do “A Single Grain of Sand,” my one-person show, which was going to have a lot of video images in it. There were rows and rows of stores just in ashes, and people were just looking in a very suspicious manner, and I guess I was unaware.

Maybe they thought I was Korean, but nothing really happened to us. They just said some nasty words, but I was really saddened by the whole situation because I felt, “Wait a minute, you don’t know who I am. You don’t know what my feelings are. You don’t know.” But it was just a general thing. If you were Asian, you must be the enemy, so it was a very tough experience for me, and that’s where I got that line, “Hey, I loved Malcolm. You could be my son.” And I really felt like that--you don’t know who I am. You don’t know my life. It sort of deepened my resolve in a way to build more bridges between communities.

‘People stopped respecting us’

LAPD Det. Federico Sicard, 52, was assigned to the child abuse unit/juvenile division in 1992. For the past six years he has worked with the fugitive warrant section. He has been in the department for 21 years.

I was at home watching the news, and I just couldn’t believe it. I’m from Colombia and was pretty much accustomed to that. Every time the prices in the bus fare went up, the students used to go out and riot. And if the teachers didn’t get paid the proper amount, there was a riot. I thought that was only in Latin America.

But I was seeing what was going on, and I felt sad. It’s the city of Los Angeles, the city that I work for. And then I was seeing it wasn’t the good people of South-Central who were creating all that chaos. It was all the hoodlums. You saw the destruction and how many innocent people were getting hurt.

It wasn’t long after I started watching that I got a call to go back to the office. We were put on 12-hour watches. We were sent to South-Central, assisting the Fire Department because they were out there putting out fires.

We could hear shots being fired, and that’s kind of scary because you don’t know where they’re coming from. It was dreadful.

I was with a big group of police officers. We felt pretty secure among ourselves because we knew what we had to do and were trained well. But the people did take it out on us verbally.

I remember we were on Washington Boulevard and there was one fire and the firetruck arrived, so we were protecting the truck and the firemen. All of a sudden, two blocks down, another fire started. They couldn’t do anything. They were still putting out this fire, and these were big fires. Stores were burning down. We had to go through those dark alleys, hearing in the background those shots being fired. That was stressful. It’s like soldiers patrolling hostile areas. You’re just sitting there. Anything could happen.

The next few days, it was like being in a storm or a hurricane. The hurricane destroys everything, and then it’s nice and quiet. It was like that, except that it wasn’t nice because there was a lot of destruction.

I remember a meat market; it smelled like a barbecue from all the meat that had probably burned. Everybody was walking around. There had been people looting and stealing, but after two days it went back to normal. It was more under control.

For me, what happened was just another verdict. I have seen in my 21 years individuals who molested children who got away with it on technicalities. This wasn’t different from that. But things changed for us a lot. From that point on, people stopped respecting us.

‘It’s made me more cynical’

Grant Mudford, 58, an Australian-born architectural photographer, lived and worked at 4th Street and La Brea Avenue at the time of the riots. As chaos broke out on the street below his studio apartment, all of his neighbors left, but he stayed.

At about 2 that day, there were carloads of people circling the building. All the shopkeepers had locked their doors and disappeared. The people in my building decided to split and wanted me to split too, but I had too much to lose. I had a life of work there, my negatives, equipment, everything.

Two friends eventually came by, and I loaded up some stuff into their truck. The computer store downstairs was picked clean. I’ve seen sharks feed in Australia, and it’s a frenzy. Even when there’s no food left, they still go through the motions, and that’s what was going on here. It was very surreal to see people behave like wild animals. They were laughing; it was like Christmas.

At the height of the looting, an SUV pulled up, and a young guy got out, knelt in kind of a combat position, pulled out a large-caliber handgun and started shooting. That scared everybody, but only for about 10 seconds. Then they came back again.

I had a shotgun, and I stood outside on the balconies and made myself and the gun visible. But I kept thinking, I’m making it obvious that I’m armed, but what am I going to do about it? I know enough about guns that you don’t idly brandish them, because if there are other people with guns, they’re not going to be too idle about it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with it, but it was really scary.

During all this I saw at least three or four police cars driving up and down La Brea with no lights or sirens, and they weren’t turning their heads. Since then I’ve realized that when the stuff hits the fan, it’s everybody for himself. I guess it’s made me a little more cynical about human nature, and it reduced my confidence in the capabilities of law enforcement. I don’t blame them. I’d do the same thing, I’m sure.

‘People were looking into faces’

Charles Holland, a TV writer and producer, lived with his wife in Century City in 1992. He was in a pitch meeting in Westwood when someone mentioned that the television anchors were telling people to go home. Holland left his meeting and tried to find a route that wasn’t completely jammed.

I was on Olympic, I think, and this car ran a red light and slammed into me. Now, I played football, so I’ve been slammed pretty hard, and this was a good hit. I had double vision. But I looked over at the driver, and I could see she was a young white woman, and she took one look at me and I could see horror and fear just spreading over her face, and she got the hell out of there. So my car was totaled, and I imagine hers was too.

At the time, my wife worked retail in the Century City mall, and her boss decided not to close shop. I would go in to baby-sit her because it was a ghost town at that mall, and she was scared. It really was weird; it was me and her and another employee in the store, and that was it.

A lot of things changed immediately. For one thing, my wife had always had trouble with [my] gun ownership, but she was pretty happy about it then. And I noticed a lot of my friends were like that. It was pretty clear that the police were busy, so they weren’t going to be able to get there if you needed them.

And I noticed in the aftermath that there was a change being seen across race. I had gotten used to the fact that people I would meet in one context would simply not recognize me in another--walking down the street, I was just a black man. But for a while that wasn’t happening. People were looking into faces as if they were looking for something. And there were conversations, dialogues that had never happened before.

My wife noticed a higher level of civility; she says people often don’t respect her space because she is a black woman. They bump into her or cross in front of her. But after the riots they were more polite. I didn’t notice that because I’m one of the boogeymen--people always gave me lots of space. It did have an effect on the way police treated people. Before that, I often got stopped by police, sometimes right in front of my own place, and asked to justify myself. But since then, that literally hasn’t happened once.

The conversations stopped, though, and people stopped looking closer. Now we’re back to the more incremental change--race relations in this country keep getting better, but it’s like a snail. Watch him and it doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere, but take a nap and he’s crossed the road.

‘The bullet was in the baby’

Neonatologist Andy Moosa was on duty at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood on the afternoon of April 30, 1992, as a second day of violence was exploding in the streets. Moosa, who had been at the hospital for 26 years, was, and still is, the hospital’s medical director of the neonatal intensive care unit. That afternoon, he got an emergency call about an extraordinary case: A pregnant woman was on her way in from Compton. She had been shot through the abdomen.

It was strange because when she was shot, she was going to the supermarket--where the bullet came from, nobody knew--and she had this white dress on. And she didn’t feel any pain. She said she just felt a jolt. And the white dress she was wearing--she was quite pregnant, the baby was almost full term--there was this red spot in the middle of her white dress just over the abdomen where the uterus is. Her sister-in-law, who was with her, said: “You know, I think you’ve been shot.” So she sees this pool of blood coming through because the bullet had gone in, but it had not exited. It had gone into the uterus; we had no idea where it was.

When we did an ultrasound, we realized that the bullet was in the baby. We could tell it was lodged in one of the upper limbs. We needed to get this baby out. So we were in the delivery room. The baby looked great, except for the swelling in the right elbow, in the fleshy part. It didn’t even fracture a bone.

By the grace of God, that [bullet] had been lodged in the soft tissue, in the muscle. The baby was fine--breathing, crying, kicking, and doing all these things, and it was a very positive thing because, in all this burning and looting and people getting shot, here was this new life. We removed the bullet from the soft tissue, stitched it up again and everything was fine.

There’s always going to be a scar. That’ll remind that child how quickly [she] came into the world, in very unusual circumstances.

Of course, being a Catholic hospital, [you think that] God is always looking after us, that things just worked out for this brand new baby, just coming into this world in a scenario of tremendous violence.

‘We had nothing to do with it’

Greg Stratton was mayor of Simi Valley for 12 years, from 1986 to 1998. As mayor he took pride in his city, home to the Ronald Reagan Library and repeatedly named the safest city in America. Stratton, 55, is a software engineer who works for Northrop Grumman Corp. in the San Fernando Valley.

I was mayor during the time, the troubles. I guess it started when the trial came. They were attempting to get away from the L.A. media, and then they thought Ventura. That might be logical, because the county seat is farther away, but then the county turned right around and reassigned it back to Simi Valley. So they basically pushed it right back into the L.A. County media world. Nobody thought much about what would happen if they were found innocent because everyone kind of assumed they weren’t going to be found innocent.

And then, of course, the whole thing turned to the “evil” Simi Valley jurors. That was the part that was our frustration, because it wasn’t just a Simi Valley jury, it was a jury from Ventura County. I think there were two people on the jury from Simi Valley. We had nothing to do with it other than we hosted the event down at our courthouse. But that’s not the way the press pitched it. And, oh, I mean I got guys who were on cruise trips who would come back and say, “You know, I was on a cruise and when I announced where I was from I was booed.”

People were trying to call us all sorts of nasty names and trying to make this out like it was a racial thing, in a community [where], frankly, the color of your skin is far less important than whether you keep your lawn mowed. Keep the crab grass out and your lawn mowed and we don’t care what color you are. And that is really true.

Ten of the jurors came from other communities, including from Oxnard and Ventura, and you certainly wouldn’t say that Oxnard is some sort of white racist community, you know?

There were a couple of attempts to make some things between us and South-Central. We had a baseball game between the police from Simi and a team from South-Central, so there were those kinds of things going on for maybe four or five years, until it died out because we couldn’t get sponsors.

‘I became aware of my race’

A singer and songwriter, Shawn Amos, 34, lives in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. He is the son of Wally “Famous” Amos, the cookie king. He was working at Touchstone Pictures when the riots happened.

I was the only black guy in my department, and I was at work that day. I remember clearly that everyone looked at me in one of two ways: Half were coming up and asking me to explain the reason for what was going on--as if I had some special insight into the situation because I was black. The other half were looking at me as if I was the one who was out there looting the stores. That day, I became aware of my race in a way I had never been aware of it before.

I grew up, for the most part, in white, middle-class Los Angeles. I was always accepted by everyone I came in contact with. But a line was drawn in the sand on the day of the riots. I suddenly realized how segregated this town really is.

I went to school in Brentwood and Beverly Hills and Hawaii. My dad was a kind of celebrity--Wally Amos. When you are a celebrity, you become colorless to a degree. I mean, living that way, I did not recognize my own blackness. I am still grappling with that. It’s become my cross to bear, to try to define what blackness means to me, as someone who has had none of the quintessential black experiences. That is the legacy of the riots for me. I was very privileged for a long time. And I feel an obligation to pay that back in some way.

Maybe in some way I can be a bridge for others who may not have had the same benefits I did. I met a gentleman named Ageela Sherrils--a former gang member. He runs a nonprofit group in Watts called the Self Determination Institute. He was one of the people responsible for forging the truce between gangs in Watts literally as the riots were breaking out. I’ve asked him to mentor me. Because I want to learn what’s going on, what my place in it is, and how I may be of service.

‘It was all about opportunity’

Andrew Kang, 35, lives in Los Angeles and works as a broker’s assistant downtown. He was at work when the riots broke out.

After the verdict came out, we heard screaming and yelling outside the office windows. Then they started broadcasting all the violence and looting going on. Downtown was filled with people passing out pamphlets; signs were up everywhere that the judgment wasn’t right, that it was a black and white thing. At work, all of us were fearful, thinking about how we were going to get home. Are we safe? Is my family safe? Are my kids at school safe? What’s going to happen?

Coming back home on the 10 freeway, I got off at Crenshaw; the minute I got off I saw a black cloud. It was a gas station on fire. Wow, this is the real thing. A riot.

In front of our house was a small aquarium store. They broke in and started taking tanks and stands and everything. I took my video camcorder out and taped the whole thing. The next day, I took it to the owner and said do what you want with it.

It was all about seeking an opportunity to profit for yourself. Those people who looted didn’t care what the judgment was. They saw an opportunity for themselves, and they took it. That’s the real frustrating part. All these innocent, small-business owners, they suffered. And why? If they think it’s the wrong judgment, they could have done something else. They didn’t have to do it this way.

‘I am not going to die this way’

Sylvia Castillo, 50, is a program officer for the California Endowment, a nonprofit health foundation. Castillo lived in South L.A. and was working at the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment at the time of the riots.

We were waiting for the verdicts to come back. We had been driving around the neighborhood, counting how many liquor stores were concentrated in a 17-mile area of South Los Angeles. We were watching people collect in the streets. We knew that if verdicts were “not guilty” we would all go to the First AME church, and from there we would get out in the community and try to engage in constructive conversation with folks we knew. As organizers, we knew people had moved beyond despair and hopelessness. Now they were feeling “what the hell ... “

Karen Bass, the executive director and founder of Community Coalition, was in her car and I was in mine, following her. We went down Florence Avenue. It’s a pretty warm day. Windows up, air conditioning on. We get to Florence and Normandie, and it seems like there’s a bit of gridlock. I see a crowd of guys with black pants and white T-shirts in front of Tom’s Liquor store. We were there earlier in the day, and they were all outside there, drinking--and now they’re still there drinking. I look ahead and see Karen make the right turn very slowly. Her hands are suddenly off the wheel, kind of signaling people to stay clear of her car, as they run up to it--guys mostly. She was signaling them to let her through.

It happened so quickly. She makes the turn, and there are tires burning on Normandie and a barricade also burning. I’m remembering this in flashbacks, because what happens next is, I hear thump, thump, thump and a lot of crashing. And I look into the mirror and my face is bleeding. And the first thought I have is, “I am not going to die this way.” That was vivid.

What had happened was my passenger-side windows had been broken out. All the glass was inside my car. There were bricks and 40-ounce bottles also thrown in my car. A man is trying to get into my car. His upper half is in my car, and the other half is outside of it. He yells, “Bitch, you’re gonna die.”

So I hit the accelerator. I can’t see anything in front of me ‘cause the front window is totally shattered. I hit the gas, and the guy goes out the window, but others are thumping against the car. I drive really, really fast, even though I can’t see.

Luckily, I only had superficial cuts and bruises. I was willing to talk [to the media], but the questions they asked seemed intent on racializing the story. I am Latina, and they’d ask, “Can you ever trust African American people again?” This was not a racial issue, and they were trying to make it one.

My anger forced me to take action. That’s when I became director for Rebuild South L.A. Without Liquor Stores--a whole new area of work was born from that riot. It was born because residents didn’t want the same old stuff rebuilt, a return to the status quo.

‘We were calling the Ritz-Carlton’

John Rechy, 67, has written 13 novels, many of which are set in Southern California. One critic called Rechy the “steadfast champion of the disregarded, no matter their gender or station in life.” Of Mexican-Scottish descent, Rechy teaches literature and film courses for writers in the graduate division of USC.

I suppose there was naivete among people like myself who really felt that such an injustice couldn’t occur. The fear came very, very quickly, because you remember that televisions were placed now on reactions around the city. Groups were glued to them, waiting for the verdict. In the black sections there was this immediate, instant rage. I remember thinking that for the next hours, days or however long that mood lasted there would just be white faces and black faces and it would not matter how sympathetic you were to Rodney King, and what had been done, how angry you were, you were going to become the enemy.

I went up the stairs to look at Los Angeles burning, and it was right here on Vermont. We were going to flee! But of course those funny moments still anchor things. We were calling up the Ritz-Carlton to see if they could take us. [Laughter.] These are the defining moments that one grasps for, because it means that your reality is still going on. The world is turning over, but, damn, you are going to go to the Ritz-Carlton.

I think that the outcry among white people, establishment people, was very significant. It indicated, we realized, that we had been naive all along, in believing that there would be a just verdict. Of course, payback came with O.J. Simpson.

For so many white people like myself, there was a disgust, and also with oneself for thinking that things had been changed so enormously, and yet here was this gross injustice being thrust on us. You know, in a strange sort of way, it indicates the kind of vitality, whether it takes the form negatively, or positively, that is in Los Angeles.

‘We prayed about it’

Jude Tiersma Watson, 48, is an assistant professor of urban studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. In 1992, she was a graduate student living in Westlake, a largely Latino immigrant neighborhood in Los Angeles. She still lives nearby.

I had been living in this Latin neighborhood for three or four years as part of Inner Change, a Christian lay order that lives and works among the poor. As the violence spread to our area, we started getting all these calls from “the outside”--friends telling us we should leave. But part of Inner Change’s philosophy is to live here. It didn’t seem right that we could leave but our neighbors couldn’t. We prayed about it and decided to stay.

I didn’t feel personally in danger, although things were out of control. Someone broke into the corner Swapmeet, a historic building that housed lots of merchants, and then everyone went in and started coming out with stuff. After the TV news announced that the Swapmeet was being looted, people from other areas started driving through to join in. Some guys in a small white pickup truck came by and threw a Molotov cocktail into the building. The feeling of the whole day was like something had been let loose--like the lid blew off the pot.

Slowly it came out that the police were trying to retrieve some of the things that had been looted from the Swapmeet and [another shopping center]. They went through apartments and, whatever looked new, people had to produce a receipt for it or the police would take it. One 12-year-old boy I knew had a bike that his sister had given him for his birthday, but there was no receipt, so the police took it. Another neighbor was eight months pregnant, and the police took her bed because it looked new. I called it reverse looting. For me, that was as hard to deal with as being here for the original part.

I worked really hard to get the bike back but never succeeded. I don’t know where all this stuff ended up. I have wondered about what kind of message it gave to that 12-year-old boy about this country and about the police.

‘We’re losing control of the city’

Richard Andrews, 60, works for a risk management consulting company in Irvine. In 1992, he was director of the state Office of Emergency Services, under Gov. Pete Wilson. When the riots began, he had just returned to Sacramento after touring the damage from an earthquake in Humboldt County.

Through that first evening, there were a series of conference calls between Gov. Wilson, Mayor Tom Bradley, Sheriff Sherman Block, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates and, eventually, the adjutant general of the National Guard. The thing that struck me was that of all the people involved, the two politicians--Wilson and Bradley--from different parties, both immediately recognized how serious the situation could become, whereas the law enforcement people didn’t. One of the law enforcement people described the unrest as a “Mardi Gras atmosphere.” They tended to think they could handle whatever happened and that the rage would dissipate during the evening.

The next morning, the most serious rioting occurred. I got a phone call from one of Mayor Bradley’s senior aides, who said, “We’re afraid we’re losing control of the city.” I was stunned. I couldn’t comprehend that the situation had gotten that desperate that fast.

Gov. Wilson decided to fly down, and I joined him. We landed at Los Alamitos and then flew by helicopter to the LAPD heliport and then went by motorcade to the emergency center in City Hall. I remember the very strange feeling of riding through the empty streets of downtown Los Angeles with police and Highway Patrol vehicles all around us and the curtains closed on our vehicle. It was very surreal.

When we came from Sacramento, we had no idea how long we’d be here. We stayed four to five weeks. I have a series of pictures from that time, and I have the same suit of clothes on in every picture. We were pretty much up 24 hours a day those first three days. You operate a lot on adrenaline.

Gov. Wilson placed me in charge of negotiations between law enforcement officials and the military. I had experience dealing with all manner of natural disasters, but no one anticipated anything like this. No one had experience dealing with U.S. troops on the streets of an American city. We had troops that had been in Desert Storm. I had to learn how to sit in a room full of military generals and say, “The governor wants you to do this and this,” and have them take me seriously. It was the most intense period of my life and probably the most gratifying because, in a real crisis, we managed to find our way through it and felt we really did perform in ways that, before that, I didn’t think I was capable of doing.

Once the rioting was over, we had assistance centers set up throughout the areas affected, and I went to many community meetings. In natural disasters, everyone in the community pulls together. Here, it was just the reverse. The community was just fractured--the Korean community, the African American community, the business community; they were all polar opposites to each other. It was very clear a lot of healing was going to have to happen.

‘My world was shattered’

Leonard Rabinowitz, 53, founder of the Carole Little apparel company, had spent more than a decade building his business at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Main Street. Nearly half of his 500 employees lived in the surrounding South-Central neighborhood, and some of them came, shotguns in hand, to defend the company headquarters against looters after they set fire to one wing of the building. The company suffered $10 million in damages, but the business was not an entire loss. Two years later, Rabinowitz showed his gratitude by donating the property to the Accelerated School, an independent charter school.

I walked into the place, and there wasn’t a piece of paper that wasn’t overturned, there were no computers left, things were fire-ravaged. My world was shattered. I was angry, very angry, but a good thing by a few people turned it around for me. When I saw that the community had come to the aid of our building, I said, “These are good people. There’s some bad people here, but the town is full of good people.”

The community did something for us, saying, “Thank you for being here, thank you for being a good employer here.” And we wanted to do something to give back. Because this was really above and beyond, although they didn’t think so.

I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. It taught me that it’s a community full of good people. I don’t think violence is the right thing, but I think it was an explosion of frustrations. There are good people that are not being attended to.

‘It had a beauty to it’

Artist Peter Alexander, 63, is known for his minimalist resin sculptures and atmospheric landscapes. Alexander, who lived in Malibu and had a studio in Venice, photographed televised images of the city in flames that he shot from news helicopters. He used the photos to paint a series of 18 black-and-white works called “Chopper.”

My father was born here, my grandfather was born here, so I’m the third generation. The only advantage of being here is that you have experienced this significant transformation of the city from sort of a sleepy place to what it is today.

So I suppose given that context, I think I perhaps was acutely aware of changes that were occurring in the city. The city started to get dark--psychically dark--probably in the late ‘80s, early ‘90’s, sometime in there. When it became sort of painful to live here, that’s when you knew it was a city. It got shifted from so-called paradise to something that hurt. But it didn’t lessen its magic, it made it something that was more real. It put it in that world-class category of Tokyo and London and New York and Paris and Rome. So when the riots actually happened it was not a surprise.

The only experience I had specifically around the riots was I drove on the freeway, when there was sort of that lock-down period in which nobody was out. It was absolutely incredible, because there was nobody on the freeway and you could see the smoke looking south into that part of L.A. The rest of the time I was watching TV, taking Polaroids off the screen, hour after hour. It was absolutely mesmerizing. There was no fear even. Maybe because we were seeing it on TV. It had a beauty to it, that you could only sense because there was no feeling, there was no smell. All I responded to were these absolutely incredible images that were so beautiful because of the fire.

I distinctly remember within the period of a week I did all the paintings. I just went bam bam bam bam bam. A lot of it was because of the emotion of what had happened. I was still thinking of beauty. I wasn’t doing it to record like Picasso’s “Guernica.” My work was never was about the horror. It made me sad.

The riots made it very clear something was wrong. It was unequivocal. It was part of the city becoming a city. Part of the growing up. L.A. had to face that it’s not all paradise.

‘A lot of people went to Malibu’

In 1992, Jannis Swerman, 48, was the maitre d’ at Wolfgang Puck’s Granita Restaurant in Malibu in 1992 and lived in West Hollywood. Today she is director of communications at Wolfgang Puck Worldwide.

When there was a crisis, we would try to keep the restaurant open, to provide a service to the community. It ended up being a good thing that we opened, because a lot of people had fled the city. A lot of people who had second homes went to Malibu because that’s where they thought they’d be safe. The people there were aware of what was going on, but not in the same way as people in the city were. A lot of local people wanted to come for dinner, because they couldn’t get out to go into town. We were actually very busy.

Our biggest challenge was to get our staff to the restaurant. We had about 70 people working there then, and most of them came to work on public transportation. A lot of the employees were coming from places downtown where terrifying thing were happening. We just did the best we could with a skeleton crew.

Many of the people who came in didn’t have a concept of how difficult it was to keep the restaurant running. That’s part of the theater of a restaurant, to create an environment that makes people feel they’re safe and things are normal. I got calls at Granita from people who said, “I’ve been calling Spago and nobody answers. I don’t understand. I need to make reservations.” Hello? They didn’t seem to know that the city was shut down. One woman was very upset because we didn’t have creme brulee available. I felt like saying, “Do you know what it took to even open the doors? There’s a bigger picture out there.”

‘They felt guilty’

Larry Fondation, 44, is vice president of Teachscape, a company that trains teachers using the Web. In April 1992, he was a community organizer in Los Angeles. He lives in Silver Lake.

On the second or third day, I was talking to a priest at one of the churches where I used to organize. He showed me all of these boxes that people brought to the church--VCRs, TVs, stereos--with the addresses of the stores that they had come from. They weren’t signed. But he could recognize some of the handwriting. They felt guilty, he said, about what they had done.

‘The rage had been fomenting’

Bryan Seiling, 34, is assistant box office treasurer for the Center Theatre Group at the Music Center. He also teaches history at Cypress Community College in Orange County. At the time of the riots he lived in Koreatown and was a teaching assistant at USC, working on a doctorate in American history. His students, studying the American experience, had been discussing the stagnation of the civil rights movement and whether another event might again propel civil rights to the front of the nation’s social consciousness.

I had this sense that we were experiencing something that was going to be talked about in history classes years and years down the line. [In my class], which was predominantly Caucasian, there was a sense of, why are these people destroying their own neighborhood? There was a lack of understanding that the rage had just been fomenting, fomenting, fomenting. I remember an African American student saying, “You don’t understand. You don’t know what it is to walk across the street and suddenly hear a car door lock click.”

About 10 years later, I was teaching at Cypress, at 9:30 a.m. Sept. 12. I was supposed to talk about colonial foundations in New England. I said we can talk about colonial foundations or we can talk about what happened yesterday because that was truly historic. One young lady said, “I don’t have any idea what the hell I’m supposed to think about what happened yesterday.” And I was thinking, that’s a pretty good paraphrase of what people were saying 10 years ago.

Those two events are very much linked in my mind, historical events that had a real impact on me. When I discuss them in class, that’s the way I discuss them--where were you? Do you remember the riots? I’ve always tried to teach the civil rights movement as a process of building things on the previous generation and what they’ve done, and it certainly is a process unfulfilled.

Ten years later, you don’t see nearly the reaction we should have had; that an explosion like that didn’t produce substantive change in race relations. It’s sobering and disappointing. I don’t have the sense that [the riots] are going to be talked about like the Rosa Parks’ bus boycott, the Selma march.

I think there’s going to be another event that will force us to change. The riots weren’t it. That’s my pessimistic view, the one that says we missed an opportunity to rise above self-interest and make social change. The optimistic view is that you look to the students who seem to have a perspective that race shouldn’t matter. If they live their lives that way, there’s the real change.

If we don’t have that change, we can’t keep a lid on it.

‘We didn’t see one police car’

Frank J. De Santis Jr., 43, is executive director of a nonprofit affordable housing development corporation. In 1992, he lived in a hilltop home in Silver Lake, just off of Sunset Boulevard.

From my backyard, which has a view overlooking Sunset Boulevard, we could see Korean liquor store owners on their rooftops with handguns and rifles, shooting at looters. There was also a market at the bottom of my street, where the owners circled the store with cars and had guys out there with shotguns. It was like a wagon train. Other buildings in the area were burning. But we didn’t see one police car, one firetruck or one ambulance until Sunday. Nothing. Not even choppers in the air.

On Wednesday at dusk, everyone on my block got together in the center of the street and figured out who had what--first-aid kits, water, food. And you wouldn’t believe the number of guns that came out. We blocked off the Sunset end of our street with old cars and took turns that night checking IDs on anyone who tried to come through. It was kinda silly because someone could’ve come in the back way, but I think the looters weren’t smart enough to figure that out.

My feeling was that this was the end of Los Angeles as a great city. I had lived on Edgecliffe Drive as a kid, from 1959 to ’65 and later bought the house [and two neighboring properties] from my parents. I even remember tanks rolling down Sunset during the Watts riots in 1965. But after this, I said, “That’s it.” I didn’t want to sell the houses, because that property had been in our family for 30 or 40 years, but I felt like if the city’s not going to protect its residents--if you can’t get basic protections like police, fire and ambulance--what’s left? We moved to the Valley and by 1993 had sold all three houses.

‘The human spirit thrives’

Nancy De Los Santos, a native Chicagoan, is a television and film writer and producer of the upcoming HBO presentation of “The Bronze Screen: 100 Years of the Latino Image in American Cinema.” De Los Santos, who worked as documentarian for KCET public television in 1992, lives in Echo Park.

Everyone in Chicago was calling and saying, “You have to leave immediately, you have to come home.” I said, “No I don’t want to leave this place now.” I felt the need to be a part of the healing and not run from L.A. because the city was burning. I flashbacked to living in Chicago as a young girl when Martin Luther King was assassinated. We lived on a third floor of a high-rise building, and we could see the cityscape from our window. In the distance we saw the fires, other neighborhoods burning and all that came back to me with the riots.

I think the riots are always going to be there in the back of my head, but yet, you go, “Wow, it’s been 10 years,” which always makes you wonder: What has changed? How have all the communities been affected? That’s what I think about.

A good question to explore is “Was it necessary? Were the protests necessary? Did people really have to riot? And I say, “It was absolutely necessary. Everybody needed to protest that decision because in many ways it was such a slap in the face to all of us that police could beat Rodney King to near death and then the cops could be acquitted. Was protest necessary? Absolutely. Did it cross the line? Yes, because it hurt the neighborhood and entrepreneurs so badly.

I think what I’ve learned since then is that the human spirit thrives no matter what. That’s what I see driving through Los Angeles. But I think we also learned that there’s still a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of hate throughout this city and a lot of friction. That still exists between the Latino and black communities.

There is a lot of fear between those two communities: fear of power, fear of loss of power, fear of control, fear of loss of control, fear of economics, fear of political prestige. It’s there. It’s bubbling. I wish that people would have a real discussion about that because without such a discussion something very hurtful in the near future could happen.

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Stories reported by staff writers Mimi Avins, Beverly Beyette, Maria Elena Fernandez, Lynell George, Valli Herman-Cohen, Christine Frey, Reed Johnson, Bettijane Levine, Hilary E. MacGregor, Mary McNamara, Martin Miller, Booth Moore, Duane Noriyuki, Michael Quintanilla, Susan Salter Reynolds, Roy Rivenburg, Mary Rourke, Jeannine Stein and Renee Tawa. Photographs by Times staff photographer Kirk McKoy.