Los Angeles Times
June 17, 2012
Details began to emerge Sunday about the death of Rodney King, a key figure in the 1992 Los Angeles riots. He was 47 and died at his Rialto home.
King’s fiancée called 911 about 5:25 a.m. and said she found King at the bottom of his pool, Sgt. Paul Stella said.
A short time earlier, Cynthia Kelley had talked to King, who was outside, through a sliding-glass door, said Rialto Police Capt. Randy DeAnda. She then heard a splash and ran out, DeAnda said. She saw King at the bottom of the pool at the deep end, he said.
Kelley is “not a great swimmer,” DeAnda said, explaining why she did not jump in. Police arrived moments later and an officer jumped in the pool and pulled King’s body onto the deck.
“There were no signs of life,” DeAnda said.
The officers attempted CPR, which was continued when paramedics arrived, he said. King was taken to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton where he was pronounced dead at 6:11 a.m., he said.
Next-door neighbor Sandra Gardea, 31, said she heard commotion in King’s backyard early Sunday morning. Gardea said about 3 or 3:30 a.m. she heard someone sobbing.
“It just sounded like someone was really sad,” she said. “There was a lot of moaning and crying. Another person was trying to console that person.”
King became a symbol for police brutality and the troubled relations between the LAPD and minority residents. He was eventually awarded a $3.8-million settlement, but the money and fame brought him little solace. He had repeated run-ins with the law and as of April said he was broke.
“I sometimes feel like I’m caught in a vise. Some people feel like I’m some kind of hero,” he told The Times earlier this year. “Others hate me. They say I deserved it. Other people, I can hear them mocking me for when I called for an end to the destruction, like I’m a fool for believing in peace.”
Milton C. Grimes, the Los Angeles attorney who represented King off and on in the early 1990s, said he received the news of King’s death via text message Sunday morning from another client.
Grimes said he was stunned. “You just don’t expect some people to go. This was sudden.”
“Rodney King was a symbol of civil rights and he represented the anti-police brutality and anti-racial profiling movement of our time,” TV host Al Sharpton said. “Through all that he had gone through with his beating and his personal demons, he was never one to not call for reconciliation and for people to overcome and forgive.”
During a public appearance for a memoir published earlier this year, King seemed in good spirits and said he was trying to turn a corner in his life. The book’s title is “The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption.”
King had long struggled with drugs and alcohol. He called himself a recovering addict but had not stopped drinking, and possessed a doctor’s clearance for medical marijuana. King last year appeared on VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab,” trying to tackle his fight with alcoholism.
King was drunk and unarmed when he was pulled over for speeding by Los Angeles Police Department officers and beaten.
The incident was captured on video by a civilian bystander, and the recording became an instant international sensation. Four of the officers were tried for excessive force. Their acquittal on April 29, 1992, touched off one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history.
“It felt like I was an inch from death,” he said, describing what it was like to be struck by batons and stung by Tasers.
A jury acquitted the four police officers in the beating of King, unleashing an onslaught of pent-up anger. There were 54 riot-related deaths and nearly $1 billion in property damage as the seams of the city blew apart.
“I would change a few things, but not that much,” he said. “Yes, I would go through that night, yes I would. I said once that I wouldn’t, but that’s not true. It changed things. It made the world a better place.”
King lived in Southern California much of his life.
When he was 2, King’s family moved from Sacramento to Altadena.
King’s parents cleaned offices and homes for a living. His father, Ronald, known in the neighborhood as “Kingfish,” died in his early 40s from pneumonia.
In junior high school, King said he began drinking. In 1989, he pleaded guilty to robbing a market in Monterey Park; the owner accused King of attacking him with a tire iron. King was given a two-year sentence.
Two years later, the videotaped beating occurred.
King said he was shocked to see the destruction of the riots that followed the not-guilty verdicts.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he says. “Mayhem, people everywhere … looting, burning. Gunshots. I turned back and went home. I looked at all of that and I thought to the way I was raised, with good morals from my mother, even though I didn’t always follow them.
“I said to myself, ‘That is not who I am, all this hate. I am not that guy. This does not represent me or my family, killing people over this. No, sir, that is not the way I was raised by my mother.’ I began to realize that I had to say something to the people, had to try to get them to stop.”
So, on the third day of the rioting, he pleaded on television: “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along?”
During the first decade after the riots, King started an unsuccessful hip-hop recording company.
Over the last 20 years, he had had repeated contact with law enforcement. He long ago stopped keeping track of his arrests for crimes such as driving under the influence and domestic assault. “Eleven times?” he said earlier this year. “Twelve?”
“For a long time, sure, I was letting the pressure of being Rodney King get to me. It ain’t easy. Even now, I walk into a place wondering what people are thinking. Do they know who I am? What do they think about what happened? Do they blame me for all those people who died?”
June 18, 2012 at 6:38 am
Yeah right, I don’t believe it one bit. Even if Rodney King tried to commit suicide by drowning on his own when he jumped into that pool, his automatic survival instincts would be to kick and swim and to try to stay afloat. Unless he was on some sort of muscle relaxers which would stop his body from being able to put up a fight…some say that’s how Whitney was able to drown in a bathtub in only a foot of water. In Rodney King’s case, he was in a pool full of water. It just strikes me as odd…why would his body be found at the “bottom” of the swimming pool? Even if he did run and jump into the pool after sobbing, in a suicide attempt, it just seems that the fiancee would have been crying and screaming and yelling “No Rodney!” “Don’t do it” at least loud enough for neighbors to hear since the nosey neighbors apparently heard alleged sobbing sounds and moans. Why was the financee talking to him through a screen? Where just arguing just moments before? Maybe in his altered state of mind with the drugs…he just couldn’t take anymore…or it could be that Rodney King was set up and made to look like he wanted to die since that’s the presentation that those who want to set up someone might try to lay out. I would want to know who had access to his house, other than his fiancee who else was there?
I tend to be more skeptical when hearing news like this. Just 47 years old around the same age as Whitney at the time of his death, similar suspicious circumstances (death by drowning in water). Some people say blacks don’t commit suicide but in an altered state of mind/consciousness brought on by the affect of drugs, anything is possible. Just look at Whitney and her battle with drugs, her dealings with being in and out of rehab. I think more needs to be talked about regarding mental illness in the black community, maybe he was depressed and clinical depression is a mental illness.
There is just too many unknowns…and I’m just freelance typing my thoughts out here, still in disbelief but I guess right now folks can only wait to hear word from the coroner’s office on Rodney’s official cause of death. Drugs and alcohol is a bad combination.
People need to put down the drugs and alcohol and learn better ways of coping with their own problems. Alcohol and drugs is a bad combination…but Rodney King’s legacy will live on.
June 19, 2012 at 6:21 am
Man listen..
Who knows what King was into?! Who and why would someone or a group want King dead?! There is an increasing voice for reparations in this country for Blacks and it’s getting louder and louder. Perhaps King would have been some sort of linchpin? Hmmmm.. Just throwing it out there.. Our Black Super Hero Johnnie Cochran was putting together a team of super lawyers to take the united states of america to court on behalf of the american negro much like the jews, and asians did. There is also a slow but increasing movement of negros to start pushing back against the so-called machine along with the rise of a new Black Panther Party. Hmmmmmm..
I’m just spitballing here but Rodney King for better or worse did represent some sembalance of hope. To me King was someone that whites had a measure of respect for and sympathized with the plight of not only the american negro but of all who are blatantly wronged and in the center of that wronging still shines like gold. King represented that to me. All I know is that something is not right here. It doesn’t make sense. They will say that King had drugs/heart desease blah blah blah.. The “official” word will say all of that. If it doesn’t make sense it’s usually not true..
..and the way things are done in this country hasn’t made sense in like forever..
June 20, 2012 at 12:51 am
“All I know is that something is not right here. It doesn’t make sense.”
I agreed that something isn’t right here. I think they need to check to see if his fiancee took out a life insurance policy on King recently or if he had an existing life insurance policy or a will, if it had been recently changed to benefit the fiancee in some way where she’d get some insurance proceeds.
I was reading online that King’s fiancee was on the civil trial (as a juror which we all already know) and that she pushed the jury to bump up Rodney King’s jury award from $100,000 to almost $4 million. Then just days after the civil trial ended that the two started dating…I bet you this lady is slick and might be hiding something. Some of Rodney’s closest friends are now saying that they don’t believe the version of the fiancee’s recount of what happened.
I mean c’mon, I saw a pic of the pool online and it is a pretty small pool…she could have jumped in that pool to save him if she wanted to. Put this into context, if this is someone I truly love and care about, the man I was planning to marry and was engaged to (like she was engaged to Rodney King) and I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this person I would do everything in my power to save him.
Or, if this was my child (if I had kids) or a close loved one…and especially my fiancee, I’m jumping in that pool immediately even if I am a poor swimmer…because in the back of my mind I’d be thinking that maybe my actions could save my loved one’s life.
Unless she let him drown to get the insurance proceeds…$$$$. I’m just saying that Cythia’s story is shaky.
June 21, 2012 at 5:39 am
Hmmmmm.. I can dig that!!
June 19, 2012 at 8:59 am
Why would anyone want Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. dead?
Why would anyone want Malcolm X dead?
Why would anyone want Rodney King dead?
Why? One thing these men all have in common is that they are political figures whose actions sparked deep change on many levels, and changed society as people knew it at the time. Rodney King is no different because it was his case that was caught on live camera and ultimately publicized around the world for all to see how African-Americans were the victims of police brutality (and still often are) by racist white cops. Especially in the inner cities of L.A., Chicago, New York, etc.
As far as Rodney King goes, he was sort of thrust into the political spotlight when LAPD officers beat him to near death but didn’t kill him the first time. This was all under the racist Daryl Gates legacy, now police chiefs are not appointed indefinitely, complaints against police officers are investigated, there are more cops of color and female officers, etc. Arguably, set in motion and sparked by the King beating and the already racial tensions between the cops and blacks during that time. No different from the 1960s when Malcolm X and Dr. King was around. I was born in the 1980s and even I know this stuff since because I read about these injustices.
I wouldn’t put it past LAPD if after King’s body was pulled from the pool that LAPD beat the body again while it was back at the coroner’s office, or at least got in a few baton hits when no one was looking just for fun. Still upset behind the changes that King’s beating sparked relative to subsequent changes within that police department.
June 19, 2012 at 9:28 am
He must have had a fight with his wife. People should realize that drugs and alcohol don’t mix with swimming. I’ve been a swimmer for over 40 years and I would never enter the water even after a few beers. Could have been a heart attack or stroke. When you hear a splash, that means that your body must have shut down and boom….you will sink to the bottom. Then again, how good of a swimmer was he. Why would they purchase a home with a pool and you have a substance abuse victim living there.
Plain stupid.
June 19, 2012 at 1:43 pm
Good point…but why would the two purchase a home together with a swimming pool if only King could swim and King’s fiancee didn’t know how to swim? What was she planning on doing, just wading in the 3ft section of the pool? Or just sitting on the side of the pool treading water back and forth with her feet?
A heart attack may be plausible, and that’s the excuse that was officially given for Whitney that she may have suffered a mild heart attack and then drowned. Maybe you are right.
I’m just saying that if I had a home with a pool…everyone in my household down to the family dog would know how to swim.