Reader stories about the LA riots

I am a Brazilian woman and I was working in LA, I have a working visa, I was taking care of a friend`s home at Crenshaw Boulevard between Washington Boulevard and the Santa Monica Freeway.
I was moving to Santa Monica and I was getting my last things in the house when a friend of mine call and said : Get the Freeway right now, I did not ask why and went to the west side of the city.
Until the Marines go to LA everything was burning, and everybody was going to the market and there was a curfew and I was alone in the apartment and watching on TV that they were throwing homemade bombs. It was really scary.

I was in the last few days of serving as the Second African-American Student Body President in the history of the University of Redlands, when I heard that the riots had erupted. I looked on television and saw things going on at Florence and Normandie, near the gas station I had gone to many times, and just a minute or so east of Hoyd's Barber shop where I had gotten my hair cut a million times. I was having a great time and much success in college, but of course my heart was with my community. The few of us at Redlands from that area talked in the commons around dinner time. I remember one white student coming up to us and asking if the Black Student Union would be "doing anything" in response to the riots. While we discussed our range of emotions: anger, fear, I probably felt a bit of relief that I didn't have to answer that question (what we would be doing) so immediately....at least, since I wasn't "right there." At least I could be thoughtful about a response from the safety of my college campus.

All the while, though, my community was on my mind. The next day, I met with the new student body president on transition issues, but remember being constantly interrupted with riot related calls. Though I was "safe," because of what was going on, I didn't feel good. Maybe safe, but not good, and not satisfied. And, though I was never a person short on words, I didn't quite know what to say and how to proceed where I was. I spent time trying to get in touch with Bobby Seale, who I had met a couple weeks before on campus, but was unsuccessful My mom still had an apartment on Florence Avenue and St. Andrews Place, and when she called me to say that the power had gone out, and we didn't expect it to come back on. Whatever I had to say would have to wait, because I sprung into action to pick up my mom.

I remember going down the 91 freeway and then getting off at Long Beach or Avalon, and driving north. The stench of smoke was powerful. I saw isolated fires, and different layers of chaos all around. I had been warned to take smaller streets, because there was more potential for accidents at the large intersections, particularly because fearful white motorists were less likely to stop. I picked my mom up, and got her to a home we had recently bought in the Victorville area. With all the detours, non-working traffic lights, and extra precautions, It was a 6 or 7 hour round trip to get back to campus. My girlfriend (now wife) was irate and relieved to see me, not knowing where I was.

I learned a lot at that time, things that help me today in my life as a practicing attorney and community member in that same Redlands town I went to school in. In the Rodney King trial, I picked up on just how differently people see the world, starting from the viewpoint of their experiences. This was confirmed several years later when, while at Northwestern Law School, I witnessed another emotional debate surrounding O.J. Simpson. I saw up close how feelings of injustice can lead rational human beings to react in hopelessness. Then, I saw the discussion and progress that resulted on my own college campus, both at the time of the riots and since. I see the same discussions coming forth as outrage over the Trayvon Martin case proceeds and am encouraged. Ultimately, I am reminded of how young Martin Luther King and so many others that changed the course of history were, and am ever so hopeful, regardless of how bleak things may seem at moments.

As I read the current articles about the change in LAPD, I cannot help thinking about the night I found myself in the midst of the riots.
Background. Lived on the streets as a parolee for a few years prior to the riot. During the time around the riots I was working as the site manager for several "Hollywood Recycling Centers" on Hollywood Blvd.

We shut down the centers when the order for curfew came. I was living near Hollywood Blvd. so I couldn't escape the chaos. I spent the night Hollywood burned walking from center to center, just observing as mobs smashed glass and tore through store fronts. Total confusion. People were fighting over the loot, piling it on top of cars... driving off and spilling everything in the street.

The buildings began erupting into flames, so I moved away to avoid all the smoke.

In the very early morning hours I returned to the center on Seward/Hudson. (The closest center to the fires engulfing the retail shops around Victoria''s Secret.)

The center was not damaged, but when I took a look down to Hollywood Blvd, it appeared to me that the firemen were down on the ground lying motionless around their trucks. It was very smoky, and the only light was from the flashing lights of their vehicles.

I ran up to the group as fast as I could, only to find they were actually resting after a very long night.

Relieved, I turned to make my way back up the street. That was when I was confronted by two young police officers in full LAPD riot gear. Both of them began raising their clubs and shouting questions at me from behind their shields.

As calmly as I could, with the building literally belching fire at us, I tried to tell them my reason for being there....

To make things worse, the officers gave me a very peculiar choice. Go to jail or go into the center of the street in front of Victoria's Secret to grab two huge carts full of loot sitting there

I had no choice...Sit there and argue or grab the loot and satisfy their curiosity.

The two huge shopping carts, were piled high with desirable apparel. The bottoms of the carts were stuffed with women's designer shoes. A considerable take you might think, but all of it was smoke/fire damaged beyond repair.

By the time I got the carts back to the corner of Hudson, the officers were gone and the fire dept. was back to work soaking everything down.

We finally opened the centers the following weekend. I put all the clothes in cardboard boxes and marked it "free". (Hollywood never had such better dressed homeless women. lol)

You could not imagine all the stuff that arrived at the center with the usual bunch of recyclers. Gold watches, leather jackets, walkmans, ect.

It's funny how little I remember from twenty years ago, but I doubt I'll ever forget that night!

I worked across the street from the La Brea Tar Pits at the time. The company CEO got on the intercom and told the staff that rioting had started and advised us all to carefully proceed home. I lived in South Pasadena then, so I thought it safer to head eastbound on Wilshire Blvd - not my normal route home. I was wrong; chaos was in full effect. And I watched subliminally - block after block like a movie - buildings and stores being ransacked. My lasting memory: A mom and her son coming out of a Big 5 store - each with a "Thigh Master" under their arm. Clearly they had arrived too late to steal anything of value.

At the time, I was working away from the fray in Reseda, however, that morning I had left my car at my mechanic in North Hills for service, and rode my bike from North Hills to Reseda.

When the riots erupted, there was all kinds of news reports of what was going on in Los Angeles, and speculation as to where the violence and looting might spread.

Thankfully, nothing noteworthy occured in the valley. But it was one of the longest bike rides of my life, always looking over my shoulder.

I was an On Air Morning personality at KJLH Radio along with Eric "Rico" Reed and J. Anthony Brown. We broadcasted throughout the unrest. Reporting on everything from fires, the arrival of the National Guard to single acts of kindness and violence.

I have many stories...but one moment has stuck with me. Feeling as though we were only seeing a mere "spill" area of the unrest (i.e. remnants of excited or fully destructive actions) from our window, I decided to leave the broadcast booth and walk down 1/2 a mile to the intersection of King and Crenshaw. To widen my scope. To get a full breadth of what was going on. I saw car-loads of young men here and there, some all around "buck wildness" (as it was called back then) plus regular traffic.

Although it runs to the beach, this section of Crenshaw was a North-South artery of the Hood. It begins at Wilshire, flows through crowded and unappealing apartment complexes, takes a dip in Koreatown and rushes to the 10, West Angeles Church, malls, Bowling Alley(back then), the Jungle, bumps the Crenshaw Mall (back then), Liquor Bank, Crenshaw Hair District, skims Leimert Park and so on.

But just before it tears through deeper terrains of the Hood, Crenshaw intersects with the EAST-WEST MLK BLVD. A wide but busy MLK like most MLK's in the Nation. Two fast and dangerous 5-laned rivers of motion coming together at one spot...

...where the power was now out.

Here is where it got weird. Through faint smoke drifting from burning buildings up a mile or so and to the chorus of on-gong and forever whistling sirens in the distance, wild eyed youths and concerned motorist were coming to an agreement at this corner and gently stopping, checking right of way and then, crossing the intersection.

Believe me when I tell you that I saw looting, destruction and buildings literally burn to the ground. For about 4 mins that I stood there...no one charged around the line. No one made a full left from the right hand lane. No one honked or cursed or ran the non existent light. It was like a bubble of civility.

No cops. No person directing. No signs. No lights. Just an understanding that, although things today will be razed, here there will be order.

The LA Riots cost my grandfather his life. I was only 12 years at the time. My grandfather was scheduled for heart surgery in LA and they had to cancel due to the violence. He passed away less than two weeks later. It is unfortunate that those that were so outraged couldnt make a more positive statement of protest instead of preventing the city in which they live from not only functioning but being able to provide for its citizens.

I was living at Pico & Robertson for 30 years. I owned firearms and the neighbors came to stay with me for a couple of days. The corner of La Cienega & Pico had been looted and set afire., the smoke was in the house and I will never forget it. Up on the corner a Miller's Outpost was looted with the perps running away down my alley with stolen goods at one point trying to enter the backyard to escape the Police. I brandished a magnum pistol and told 'em to get the **** away and , they did. After that, martial law was declared and after 4 local killings the furor and terror died down. I was totally upset that my life was out of control. The police, god bless 'em, would not show up along with LAFD.

Now, I am on Big Island of Hawaii in the jungle really. I still have animals that survived that terrifying experience with me. Up country here, we hula and have a glorious time. Really, when that crap came down, seeing the truck driver being beaten to death with no public help from the law, just made me decide that remote was better. It is.

I was a Patrol Sergeant with the Inglewood Police Department. It was my birthday so I took the night off, but I was soon called back to duty after our officers became involved in several shooting incidents with rioters. As I drove to work on the elevated 405 freeway, I could see patches of smoke and fire spread out over the South LA skyline. Once in Inglewood, I found the the streets had become a shooting gallery. People indiscriminately firing guns at anyone and anything that moved. Smoke permeated the air. It was like a war zone. Outnumbered and with no outside help arriving for days, the normal protocols of policing went out the window. Officers improvised as they went along trying to restore order. In the end we all survived, and although the city took a big hit from the shootings, fires and looting, it too managed to see civility again.

I was flying into LAX that day. As the plane was making its final approach for landing, I looked out the window and saw a fire burning. Then another, and another, and another. The passengers in the plane didn't know the verdict before the plane had left the east coast, but the outcome was clear. To say it was a surreal and saddening experience would be an understatement.

I remember that a little situation around the courthouse being allowed to develop into a totally lawless situation. This was a media inspired riot and I will never forgive the media for the damage they did. I saw young people acting out in a nihilistic fashion. I was sadden to see totally innocent people being caught up just because of their race. I saw innocent Korean shopkeepers business go up in smoke. I personally saw the damage done to an Armenian shoe shop owner having his business vandalize and destroyed for nothing. Remember when you see today stoking of racial hate what it can lead to. I pray nothing like that happens again. But I see the same kind of hatred being stoked by the media in the Martin/Zimmerman case today.

I was living in Hancock Park at the time.I first heard about the verdict on my car radio. A couple of hours later, I caught a TV news report in which a helicopter was circling a small fire. Upon closer inspection, the reporter realized it was merely an old man burning trash in his backyard. Flustered, maybe even embarrassed, the anchorman didn't know what to say. After a moment, he asked, "Well do we know if he's burning his trash in protest of the verdict?" And then it all started.

The media was looking for a story and managed to create one. I often wonder how differently things might have turned out had that man put off burning his trash for a few days. Or had the city just not watched TV that day.

It was rather ironic how I came to experience what I did on April 29, 1992, and where. I was a student at Pierce College in Woodland Hills at the time and a photography class assignment to illustrate the theme of "Man's Impact On His Environment" was coming due. On April 29 I got on my motorcycle from Sherman Oaks to go to Baldwin Hills with the idea of photographing the oil derricks pumping there along the ridge lines. Dissatisfied with the results I ended up at Kenneth Hahn State Recreational Area at one of the horseshoe pits taking set-up shots of my shoeprint and a crushed flower in the dirt. While I was doing this a woman came over, sat on the backstop of the pit and watched me for a couple minutes until she finally asked me if I'd "heard the news?" I stopped and shook my head. "They were found not guilty," she said and I knew instantly she was referring to the officers in the Rodney King beating trial. I expressed my incredulity and then promptly went back to taking pictures of my shoeprint. She waited a few more moments before standing up. "I don't think you understand," she said, "I'm black, and I'm leaving."

It took another click of the shutter for me to stop, look at her and finally fully comprehend what she was trying to get through my thick white head, and when I did I said thank you, wished her good luck and wasted not another second getting back to my motorcycle. When I got to it a pick-up truck drove past me in the parking lot, stopping a few spaces down from me. In the cab were two young black men with two more riding in the bed and all were staring at me hard and mean. There was no mistaking their rage and that it was focused directly at me. Fortunately, parked down past them at the end of the lot was a police car -- not an LAPD black-and-white but a "Safety" police vehicle (whatever that meant). The patrol car was too far away to tell if it was occupied, but its presence made the four men hesitate enough looking from it back to me and back to it to give me enough time to get my helmet on and my motorcycle started and out of there.

By the time I got to the bottom of the hill, the Fedco that used to be at Rodeo and La Cienega was already on fire, and I split the lanes heading northward between cars many of whose drivers looked terrified stuck there in the gridlock. When I got home I turned on the television and Los Angeles had turned into a living burning hell. I locked the doors, loaded the gun, and emptied a bottle of vodka that first horrible night.

Whose to say what might have happened to me if that woman hadn't warned me or that police vehicle hadn't been there, but I'm glad either way I didn't have to find out.

Days later after the chaos had been quelled and a certain order had been restored, I was in the dark room at Pierce College developing the negatives for the photo class assignment, and it dawned on me that the image's subject matter was something I could have easily recreated in the relative safety of my own backyard instead of in the midst of the widening war zone of the riots.

I was working nights at a vocational school in the San Fernando Valley. I lived about five miles away and didn't own a car back then. I recall watching the 5pm news before I left for work and seeing the verdicts, which made me fall off my chair. In no time, a co-worker had to leave early to watch her kids because her husband, a CHP officer, was dispatched for emergency duty. Then when word of the unrest spread, we sent everyone home early and shut the school down for the night. I hitched a ride with a co-worker, even though for some bizarre reason I was prepared to walk home. I then spent the rest of the night in my bedroom watching the TV footage and peering cautiously out of my window with a resounding tinge of fear.

I remember it all so well. I was just about nine months pregnant with my second child. My mother warned me to stay at home because she felt there would be rioting. Being a 22 year old strong minded and very immature, I thought my mother was crazy. I felt nothing like that could happen in my time...that was in her time(Watts riot).So I hopped in my car with my three year old son, and very pregnant self. I headed out toward my sister's house from the eastside of L.A. to .... I traveled my ususal way up Florence until it connects to Manchester, and that's where it started for me. Traffic was bad going up Florence westbound, so I took a slight detour thinking I was going around an accident. when I came back onto Florence I ended up right behind Reginald Denny's truck. I could barely see around it cause it was so big, but I could see it was a ton of chaos all around. I slightly pulled up around the truck, because it would not move. That's when I noticed a car that was upside down on the other side of the intersection. Then I surely believed it was a bad car accident,until I looked to my right and seen people coming out of this liquor store on the corner with cases of beer, etc. That's when it hit me there was no accident a riot really had started. It was so surreal. There were no signs of ambulances, no sirens, and no police, only a helicopter flying above. I didn't understand. My motherly insticts quickly kicked into gear after witnessing all the chaos; the fighting,and looting,etc. With no police around to help, I felt helpless. How can I save my three year old son being nine months pregnant barely able to walk. So, I put the pedal to the medal and sped off as fast as I could, hoping nobody jumped in the way, cause I was not stopping. Days following I had learned from the news I was actually behind Reginald Denny. The same clips I was watching on tv was the same I had just experienced days before with my own eyes, it was ery. As the riots grew all over the streets of Los Angeles, my mother, some friends and I walked up and around the streets of my mother's neighborhood(Slauson/between Figueroa and Hoover)we watched in disbelief all the fires, and looting(people actually walking down the street with big couches)stolen from a well establised furniture store that had been looted and burned down(it was white owned). All the stores I grew up shopping at(Park N'Shop)on Slauson and Figueroa, the Pep Boys I had once worked at(Vermont and Slauson)just gone.

I gave birth to a baby boy 15 days later, which made it a birth that would practically go down in history.

I will never forget the 1992 Los Angeles Riots!

I was pregnant with my first child and needed to get groceries. I went into the Bob's market on Gateway where and people were shopping for supplies like we had just had an earthquake. After about 5 minutes I heard 2 men arguing (over corn if you can believe that) and then one of the men up and had a heart attack. The bank that I worked at decided to close early because the foresaw a catastrophe coming and they were right.

There was destruction everywhere you went. Fires, vandalism, broken windows, burned cars, and this was just on the westside.

Tensions were high. Just needed a single reason for Unrest. Most unsettling time for the city. Sadness to see our neighbors businesses go down in flames. Mob rule, police learned that the mob can rule. Police Departments learned a lesson in proactive community communication.

A lot has changed, more big business in South Los Angeles. This generation only knows the folklore. Still, more can be done to build the community, and relations between Police, Politicians can always improve.

I had opened my retail store one month before the riots. It was located in Van Nuys on Roscoe. My family and I were watching the news on the tv when the security company called and said there was a break-in, however they couldn't send out an investigator (or the police) because they were all swamped with urgent requests for assistance.

I got in the car and drove from Pasadena when I saw about 100 people inside the store (a pickup truck had driven through the glass windows and security gate) and they were taking everything that wasn't nailed down ( as well as fixtures which were nailed down). There was a motorcycle cop parked in the middle of the street and I told him that was my store and can't he do anything about the looting. He said no, there was nothing he could do as there were too many people there and he didn't have any back-up. It was a surreal scene as if all law and order was suspended and the cops were helpless to assist. So the cop and I just stood in the middle of the street and watched it happen.

I was working as an Investigator for the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner at the time. I have several stories that are too long to write out, but here is a very brief one: The day that the riot started I was working a case of a natural death out in Santa Monica. For some reason that I cannot recall, I had ridden there in the van with my transport worker. Usually I would have driven a marked sedan. While we were at the scene finishing up the investigation, the police officer who was there took a call on his radio that we did not hear. He then asked if we could finish up without him, which is unusual because law enforcement would usually stay on the scene until we secured the premises. Nevertheless, we did not see any reason we needed him to stay and he seemed in a hurry to go. So no problem -- the officer took off, we finished up and secured the premises and then after loading the decedent into the van we started back across the 10 freeway to return to the Coroner's office on Mission Road adjacent to downtown Los Angeles. As we were driving we saw a large fire on one side of the freeway. Then very shortly we saw another on the other side. Then another, and another. It seemed like we were driving through an open-pit barbecue. We had no idea what was going on until we got into the office and heard the news. It would have been nice if the officer had given us a head's up that we were about to be driving through the heart of an active civil unrest!

My office was at Wilshire & Hobart, but I was at a different location on that day, not too far away. The business that I was at told me that they were closing office and leaving. I called my office and was told that they're all leaving and the gas station across the street was on fire. I called my husband (we had carpooled that day), and we got out of the city quickly. What I remember best is all the people pouring out of buildings. It seemed like a scene out of a horror movie.

I remember a work colleague told me about the verdict and thinking, "Huh. Well, Simi Valley is about the most pro-law enforcement community in Southern California, so I could have guessed that." I didn't think of it as racial, I thought of it as a police issue. As a 3rd generation Angeleno I had learned early 'Don't mess with the LAPD.' So I went back to work. I didn't think anything would happen. Awhile later our Boston office called and said, "Are you guys OK? How far are you from the riots?" Huh?!? We were in one of the towers in Marina del Rey on PCH. Everything looked normal out our windows. I suggested we go up to the top (14th) floor, which was empty waiting to be finished out. From there we could see columns of smoke a few miles to our southeast. The air was still and the columns rose vertically to the inversion layer, giving it the look of mushroom caps. KNX had reports of rioting just 3 miles from our location. The Boston HQ told us to shut down and go home to wait it out. I think the city made that recommendation about the same time. It seemed everyone simultaneously tried going home. I remember crawling, bumper-to-bumper on the 405 north listening to rumors of the riots moving west and overrunning the freeway (which never happened). I don't think we ever got over 5mph until we hit the top of the Sepulveda Pass, then everyone drove like a bat out of hell. Luckily I had shopped the day before so had plenty of food. My wife and I stayed at home the next 3 days. At one point there was some rioting near my neighborhood grocer in Sylmar - the only problems outside the LA basin - but the LAPD quickly stopped that. When I went out the 3rd day there were National Guardsmen at the local Vons. I remember noticing their rifles didn't have ammo clips in them and hoped nobody else noticed. To me it was the nadir of LA's history, just 8 years after its peak around the 1984 Olympics.

I was conducting an audit of a small business located in the South Bay area for a state taxing agency.

Everyone in the office was listening to a radio in anticipation of the announcement of the verdict. I don't recall the reaction to the verdict, but when reports of the disturbances began, the business immediately closed for the day and the staff left to return to their respective homes.

I got on the San Diego Freeway to return to my office in Torrance. I'll never forget the panorama of the hints of violence and destruction that were occurring: half-a-dozen columns of dark smoke appeared on the horizon from Long Beach to the west side of LA.

When I returned to my office, people were frantically streaming out of all the exits to get to their cars and away. I saw my boss and he simply told me go home. That's when I decided to leave Southern California for good. Three years later, I moved my family to Sacramento and never looked back.

I was born and grew up in the mid-cities area and spent 40 years there but after several devastating earthquakes, two riots and the sense that my personal safety was always in jeopardy from dope fiends and gangbangers, I left for good.

At about 1pm my boss appeared at my cubicle and told me I better head home now. There was a riot going on near my neighborhood. I was living in Pico Union and working in Westwood.

I dropped off a coworker in West Hollywood. From the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and North San Vincente we could see huge columns of smoke rising from the downtown area. As I approached Olympic Blvd and Vermont Avenue there were fires burning on all corners and trucks in the intersection. Groups of people were sprinting across the boulevard. I headed north a couple blocks and took 8th Street east. Miraculously I made it across Vermont and into my building’s parking.

Our place was okay, but there was a lot of smoke and we wondered how long we could stay. A group of neighbors asked us to join them in patrolling the building. “Traer su pistola, por favor” said one burly fellow. “No tengo una pistola” I answered sheepishly.

Just north of us on Olympic Blvd helicopters were picking terrified people off the roof of a burning apartment building and our little corner store was being violently looted. We could hear sirens, screams, circling helicopters and windows being smashed.

Our building made it through the night intact. Dawn brought an eerie quiet and a break in the smoke. By noon trucks full of armed national guardsmen came rumbling down our street much to the delight of the neighborhood. We hooted and waved and they smiled and waved back.

People cautiously ventured out of their buildings, looking around and assessing the damage. There were groups of women carrying brooms shouting “Barremos! Barremos! As? no tenemos miedo!” Many joined in and our street cleanup began

On April 29th, I was a senior in high school. My mom took me to a school fundraiser at Shakeys and all the news channels were talking about the acquittals. By the time my mom and I got home my brother was yelling for us to watch the news. We were watching the beginning of the Civil Unrest Live on TV. It's still very haunting.

I have an aunt who was flying back to LAX on an international flight that night, as they were descending she looked out the window and freaked out watching her city on fire.

I went to school the next day, and by 4th or 5th period the Principal came over the PA telling everyone to go straight home. As my friends and I walked out of school there was a sense of uneasiness. I asked one of my good friends to walk me all the way home.

Like many parts of the LA, Hollywood was also looted. The next morning my parents woke up super early and went to stock up on food and water at dawn (after curfew). No one knew how long this would last.

Not sure if it was Wednesday or Thursday night that a radio station from Chicago called and asked for my opinion, guess they were randomly calling LA households asking for their input on what was going on and to be honest at 17 I myself did not completely understand. This was all happening in LA but I had very little understanding of what is was to live and grow up in South LA.

The aftermath is what I remember the most, areas where the charred remains of a building remained and next to it a building untouched. The tension that remained could be cut with a knife.

I was a 13 year old Junior High student who lived in quiet South Pasadena. The news about the verdict and the riots seemed to me at the time to be an event affecting other people in other places.

On the days of the riots, I could smell smoke. It smelled like a forest fire. I couldn't believe the smoke was traveling all the way up from South Central to where I lived. But I didn't think it would affect me in my city in any other way.

Then, I was shocked to find out that Buster's Ice Cream Shop, an iconic South Pasadena business I passed daily on my walk to and from school, had been broken into and looted. I saw how its window had been boarded up, and the interior trashed. I didn't understand why anybody would do something like that. I wondered if any of the kids I knew at school could have been involved, and whether their motives had anything to do with Rodney King or if it was more just because they were bad kids.

This is the middle of the story.

The night before, teachers had called me not to drive on the freeway, not to go to school. It wasn't safe. I was in my second or my third year of teaching at Dorsey High School. I live in Harbor City. School was cancelled. It was a day off. I went to the grocery shopping.There was no food in the grocery stores. I had never experienced this before, being a recent transplant from a different state. I went to the Mall. At about 11 am, we were told that the Mall was closing due to "disturbances in the downtown". I went to a different mall. It was also closing so I went home. I soon began watching the chaos of the rioting. So for days, on TV, I watched the riot in the neighborhood where I taught.

Two weeks later, it was time to go back to school. Driving down the street I hardly recognized, many of the locations had been burned to the ground, other were just charred remains. The National Guard was waiting at the school, checking every vehicle that came in to school. They remained for weeks. I remember police opening and searching lockers of students. I remember the police students being pulled out of class with no explanation.

The story continues.

There are incidents in life that one can never forget. These images stay ingrained in one's mind forever. The incidents that occurred 20 years ago have directly affected the person I am today.

I was 10 years old when the L.A. Riots happened. I remember watching live television coverage that afternoon as violence broke out in the far south side of the city. I remember seeing Reginald Denny pulled out of his truck and beaten. A priest presiding over the chaos. I also remember thinking that the violence was so far south that it could never reach my neighborhood; my family lived near Dr Martin Luther King Blvd and Western Ave. By dusk, the stores down the street from our home were in flames with people looting and destroying property.

It took a few days for our lives to return to normalcy, and when we finally left our home, our neighborhood was in ruins. Businesses were boarded, "Black Owned" spray painted over ruins and National Guard perched above our local supermarket. For years after the Riots, I remember seeing these ruins.

Years later, my family gathered enough money to purchase a home and move to the West Adams District. I went to high school and college. I moved to Northern California and started a family in the suburbs. But, the memories of those days in April, 20 years ago will always remain with me. I never want my family to see such chaos and hatred, but I always remind them that life can be much worse. We must always have respect and appreciation for what we have.

Although only 8 at the time, I remember that day very well. My family and I were at a Dodgers game and around the 4th or 5th inning there were numerous amounts of helicopters flying around the stadium and surrounding areas of downtown LA. Some other fans behind us had a portable radio and we started hearing the reports of looting and riots breaking out. We left by the end of the 6th inning and I still remember the smoke and the eery bright orange night sky from all of the fires, and hearing endless amount of sirens on the way home. I don't remember much from that age, but that day I remember very well

I was a physican assistant student in the emergency department at LACounty+USC Medical Center. I spent two shifts doing nothing but suturing lacerations (mostly on feet) caused by broken glass.

I was 15 years old walking down Avalon at 6:00am towards a RTD bus stop on my way to Junior High. It was a route I walked many times except this time it was different. Our local Mini Market called Henry's Market had 3 National Guard posted in front with military assault rifles. Oddly it did not feel threatening but rather calming they said Hi and I said whats up and kept walking. I knew why they were in my neighborhood. A day earlier another local Liquor store was looted and set on fire. But no one messed with Henry's Market and no one had intentions because it was a staple of our community. The sky's were on fire it was on every TV channel. Live uncensored footage of chaos in our streets like a twisted reality show, you couldn't escape it. It changed me, it changed every one I knew around me.

I was living on Obispo Ave in Long Beach and working at an animal hospital. I was taking a physics class at Cal State Long Beach that day when the professor made an announcement: "There is an emergency and after the exam you can leave" I think it was a final exam or a test. When I finally got out of class in the late afternoon the campus was completely deserted. It was a scary feeling walking all the way from the science building to my car and only seeing 2 other people on campus.

Once in my car, i heard what was happening on the radio and stopped by the grocery store near the traffic circle. It was jammed. Since the instructions on the radio urged everyone to stay inside, I bought easy to make food items and magazines but it took me nearly two hours to check out because the lines were so long.

I stayed inside all weekend but watched the news and found out the National Guard was in Long Beach and that a long time furniture store had been burned to the ground as well as a DMV office. Once I finally left my apartment, I saw one National Guard truck near 4th and Redondo.

Mostly I remember the aftermath, the guy who got pulled out of his truck and barely survived and the people who regretted stealing in the heat of the moment. Many who went to court simply admitted what they did and the courts let them go because they returned the items. I think this was the right decision, a kind of restorative justice.

Many promises were made about rebuilding the city and most were broken. The city had an opportunity to rid itself of the gangs at that time but did not take it.

I lived with my wife and three small children in Baldwin Hills at the time, but worked in the Computer Science Department at UCLA.

I remember taking a bus home around the time the verdicts came in. I got home and remained inside that night, watching the events unfold that first night. The following morning I went in to work. The Chevron gas station at La Brea & Coliseum was torched, but the historic Baldwin Theater was not. The Thrifty's at La Brea & MLK was a smoldering ruin. Those of us who made it in to work that morning were sent home by mid-afternoon.

My wife came to pick me up (we shared a car and I often used public transit). It took her two and a half hours to wind through traffic from mid-city to Westwood that day. I drove all of us back, mostly on Pico Blvd. Around Hauser, we began to see people running in and out of stores and back and forth across Pico wheeling stoves, refrigerators, carrying television sets. There was already smoke in the air and it was still late afternoon. In our Black P. Stone Jungle neighborhood there was graffiti proclaiming "LAPD 187", and there was a feeling that open insurrection was possible, that during that second night automatic weapons fire might be unleashed by snipers with AK-47s posted up on the rooftops. That second night it felt like we were hunkered down with our television sets in South-Central Beirut.

The night of the verdict we had tickets to Dodger Stadium. It was bat night . . . My wife, 3 year old son, a nephew and I all went to the game. Although we were aware of the verdict, and understood what was happening in South Central, the actual "riots" really had not begun. Once inside the Stadium we were quickly swept up into the game, and the events outside faded from our thoughts. As part of bat night fans received a voucher for a bat at Target. My son was disappointed as he assumed he would get a bat right then, but I assured him that we get the bat at the store.

As always I listened to Vin Scully and the team calling the game on the radio. There was no mention of the events developing outside the stadium, and when the game ended we headed out onto the South 110 and then 101 West through Downtown. As soon as we turned onto the 101 it was obvious that things were out of control. There were people visible on the freeway, some scaffolding was toppled onto the shoulder, and some of the Palm Trees bordering the freeway were on fire. The reality of what was happening started to come into focus. My three your old asked "what's happening, Daddy?" And what came to mind was "people are angry, Jeffrey." He quickly replied "because they didn't get to get their bats?"

This story has always brought a smile when thinking of a 3 year old's perspective and all else that was going on at that moment. I am still shocked that The Dodgers and KABC radio didn't warn fans as to what they would face when leaving the stadium. What a scene!

In May of 1992, I was a freshman living in the dorms at CSULB. During the riots, our school was closed and we were held to a curfew. During this time, there were many heated arguments on our floor about race, racial profiling, civil rights, human rights, etcetera.

I will never forget May 5th (Cinco de Mayo), the day our curfew was lifted, I decided to grab my backpack and witness for myself what had happened in the Long Beach area. I didn't have a car at the time, so I headed out down 7th street toward downtown.

In my na?vet?, I didn't recognize initially what I was witnessing. I was passing through an area of Long Beach that had many Asian businesses and increasingly the businesses were boarded up. My initial impression was that many of the shops had gone out of business. It wasn't until I saw the first burnt structure, that I realized all of these businesses had been broken into and looted. I began to count the number of structures that were burned, but there was no way to keep track of the amount of businesses that had been looted.

Walking on, I found myself in a few situations that were somewhat stressful. At one point, I was walking, not in the best of neighborhoods, in front of a liquor store. For reasons I can't quite pinpoint, the air was tense. People were generally hushed, but you could tell something was about to happen. Several men began to cross the parking lot to enter the liquor store at different angles and each was making eyecontact with another that signalled to me it was time for me to quicken my step and get out of the way of whatever was about to happen. I thought it was pretty brazen of the liquor store owner to be open in the first place.

A couple of times on my walk, I passed through areas where groups of African-Americans sat talking on the steps of their apartment buildings. Needless to say, a very white looking young college student, garnered a lot of glares and wary looks as they paused their conversations as I walked by.

By the time I got downtown to where the Long Beach Mall was near Ocean Blvd. and Pacific Ave, I had counted 9 structures had been burned in all. One was a gas station of all things. Some were individual shops, and a couple were entire strip malls that were completely destroyed.

Even though I was aware from the television coverage that the National Guard had been called in, I was caught off guard when I saw them in person, riding in military jeeps donning riot gear. They had a large area barricaded downtown so there was no access to the mall. There is one image that was seared in my mind of a National Guardsman standing on the corner just the other side of the barricade. He had no government issued weapon, but simply a long two by four that he kept smacking into his opposite hand. I suppose it was a warning.

I believe I took a safer route home back to the dorms along Ocean Blvd and through Belmont Shore. All in all, I must have walked at least 15 miles that day and had the blisters to prove it.

I remember that CSULB offered a new course for undergrads to take dealing with race relations the following semester. If I recall correctly, there were four professors teaching the class, one Hispanic, one African-American, one Asian, and one Native American. The class took place in a large lecture hall with many students and the class discussions were emotional and heated. Many days the arguments would lead to yelling, tears, and immense frustration.

I now teach language arts at a low socio-economic middle school in San Bernardino. It's funny to me that the vast majority of my students have no clue as to who Rodney King was or what the LA riots were about. Rarely do they know that they even occurred. Often I am frustrated by their lack of background knowledge, yet also I am often uplifted by their optimism and their ignorance of racial barriers when they ask things like, "So, did you live in the times of racism, Ms. Vega?" Or they make assumptions at times that racism no longer exists. I assume the Trayvon Martin case is going to flavor their perception these days, but on the whole, I feel that students today believe we live in a world where racism is a dying concept.

I was working near LAX when the verdict was announced, few hours later I can see small patches of smoke near the city from my office window. It took me nearly 4 hours to get home, which was maybe 18 miles away. The streets were in a state of chaos, no one followed traffic rules, everyone was running red lights, it was like a war zone. I took La Cienega Blvd and passed Jefferson Blvd the next day on my way to work and noticed buildings on fire and broken windows, people looting. I also stopped by to see a friend who owned a small grocery store on Crenshaw and MLK Blvd. He had a large group of neighborhood friends who were in front of the store discouraging people from trying to steal or loot his store.

I was 13 years old in Koreatown but was bused to the valley for magnet school. On the way home the day the riots erupted, I didn't realize the gravity of the situation until we passed through the 101 Fwy by Capitol Records. There, you get a huge landscape view of LA. It was littered with patches of smoke everywhere. It looked just like images of a bombed out Iraq from the first Persian Gulf War. That was the first time we ever put bars on our windows and they've never come down since.

I was a Deputy General Counsel to the Christopher Commission, which had made a series of recommendations in the wake of the Rodney King beating. Some of those changes required amendments to the City Charter, and the kickoff of that campaign began on the day after the verdict was announced.

The leaders of the "Charter F" group -- the group supporting the amendments -- held a press conference at the top of the Transamerica building. All of Los Angeles' leaders (except Chief Gates) were there. Mayor Bradley, Richard Riordan, the Cardinal, Warren Christopher, members of the Christopher Commission, members of the City Council, and others. The press was there in force. Bottles of Perrier filled the tables lining the walls and windows.

As the conference went forward, we began to see plumes of smoke rising above the City. The riots had begun. By the time the press conference was over, downtown Los Angeles was essentially deserted. An eerie quiet pervaded the area; the quiet before the storm.

I walked a member of the Christopher Commission to her car as there was a palpable lack of safety. I went back to my office on Bunker Hill. By the time I got there, I could see that the freeways were jammed and the radio was full of broadcasts that the riot was in full swing.

I stayed downtown, watching from my 34th story window, wondering if Los Angeles would ever be able to recover. A few days later, I learned that my cousin was one of the victims of the riots. He had been murdered. We have come a long, long way in the last 20 years.

My mom and I were driving home from the Getty (in Malibu) when we heard the verdict on KLOS. My mom looked at me and said: "there will be riots." She lived in South Gate during the Watt's riots so had a good instinct. Indeed, as we drove north on the 710 to return to South Gate where my grandmother was still living, we witnessed plumes of smoke, lots of pillaging, and anger. My grandmother and I made it through the long weekend, but parts of South Gate looked like a war zone. I'm proud to say, however, that South Gate as well as many other east LA cities have emerged successfully. I think LA has grown tremendously since the Watts' riots.

I attended night classes at UCLA. When class finished (about 9:30p), from the building 6th floor, I watched L.A. being set ablaze! From Koreatown to South L.A., small fires grew larger and larger. Having heard the verdict earlier in the day, I knew the cause but hadn't known the full effects until I got home.

Later, on television, the news spoke of how the fire and police departments withdrew from the city streets, fearing for their safety. As the city burned and got looted, the ones entrusted to "protected and serve" were pulled back by the infamous Darryl Gates. And, in some fashion, I think that Mr. Gates had a major role in the occurrences of that night, 20 years ago.

I was in my 2nd year at California State University, Hayward and Vice-President of the Black Student Union. As the days developed and evolved to the verdict day, campus conversations and "talking-sessions" had been coordinated with campus officials to frame the debate along academic/research ideas verses hype-politicization and violence, which many in our ranks thought was necessary. The day of the verdict we called a campus call at the "quad" to speak, with an open mike. It turned into a fight on stage between calmists/pan-africanists verses black frat boys and younger students who felt that a roit was necessary and drove to push for open rebellion in partnership with groups in Oakland and Berkeley.

The leadership of the BSU and Cal State called a march through Hayward (without violence), though some tried to smash windows and cars. We stopped most of it calling for Peace in the Streets, and a lot of the other "jargon" of the day.

The evening continued when about 100 of us got on BART and trained to downtown Oakland for a rally and march with Angela Davis, and other local blacktavists....it was a GREAT night for many of us in that we discovered the chasm between violent advocates and calmer heads.....it split many of us apart where we still don't speak much if at all....

A group of us returned late from lunch at Lawrey's to find co-workers at Citicorp Plaza pouring out of the downtown building to return home. A short while later, the drive west on the 110 and the 10 was surreal: a mid-day traffic jam westbound on a clear, sunny mid-day, but with columns of smoke rising up from the neighborhoods on either side of the freeway throughout the downtown area. For the next couple days, life in west LA was uneventful and much as it might have been for friends and relatives elsewhere in the US: glued to the television watching something that was occurring far away, and with little impact on one's own neighborhood. That said a lot about why the anger surprised authorities and other Los Angelenos: vast regions of the metropolis, separated from South Central by highways and driving distances, had no contact with the area and no idea what frustrations were building.

Days later, the next thing I noticed was how many of my co-workers downtown struggled with difficult commutes from South Central in the wake of the riots. Notwithstanding all the images of looting and violence on people's minds, most residents of South Central -- hundreds of thousands of them -- were struggling to make a living and fight the commute to work, like people anywhere else.

Some of my earliest memories are of the LA Riots. I was three years old at the time, and we lived in Westwood, just across from UCLA. Our house was close enough to Koreatown and Mid-Wilshire that we could see the fires pretty clearly from our roof. My clearest memory of the time was watching the smoke with my father and sister and thinking that it was very pretty.

I was defending an employer in a wrongful termination case, and the former employee had threatened his two African American supervisors with making use of his "sharpshooter" rating. We went to court downtown for a restraining order and made plans to return for the signed orders after lunch. I drove to my Long Beach office and saw smoke from some fires along the 710; when I got to my office I called the clients to arrange a lunch meeting to distribute the signed orders, and they said, "The building at 6th and Vermont just got torched. We are going home. You should too." We closed our office and I went home. I can still visualize my son, then two, playing with his toys on the living room floor on that sunny April day while the TV showed Los Angeles in flames.

The LAUSD had hundreds of students transported to schools throughout the greater L.A. area that needed to return to the areas involved with the rioting and destruction. Neighborhoods were literally closed off for the children with no way for the families to get to them. We established safe school shelters to receive bus loads of students and I spent the night with many at Belmont HS surrounded by chaos and emergency vehicles flashing across the city. Felt like a war zone and I can still remember the smell of smoke and other odors all around us. Fortunately, all of the students were reunited with their families.

I was assigned to Wilshire Division at the time as a second year officer on the LAPD. I remember standing in formation in the parking lot of the station listening to the Sgt's barking out out the assignments, all the while watching and feeling the heat of the 200 foot flames as it engulfed the swap meet next door. To ME back then.... it appeared it was the end of the world.

I had just moved back here. I had a singer, Rozalla set to come and preform shows here after she finished our Japanese dates. After I saw what happened at Florence and Normandie I told the road manger to not get on that plane to come to LA. I had a gut feeling that all hell was going to break loose. I remember the run on the Ralph's grocery store, people stocking up on food. Watching the fires burn from the hill I lived on, and breaking the 10PM police curfew. My boyfriend at the time was one of the last kids to get out of Vietnam at the Embassy. The helicopters caused him to relive that nightmare and his PTSD kicked in. He stayed in a closet for two days.

My father had been in business in Los Angeles for about 30 years at the time. He sold merchandise to mom & pop stores all over Los Angeles County. He had about 500 accounts the day before the riots started. He couldn't go to work the during the days of the riots. I remember him sitting in front of the TV, seeing many of his accounts being looted and/or going up in flames. As the camera focused on each location, he watched, stoically naming each store he recognized as one of his customers. By the time the riots were over, he had lost more than 50 per cent of his business. He was 76 years old at the time and though he'd been very ambitious all his life, those days sucked the life out of him. I'd never seen him depressed until that day.

I worked at an educational nonprofit organization in the mid-Wilshire area. An employee turned on the radio that day to hear the results from jury deliberations on the Rodney King beating. A commentator reported that the three LAPD officers had been acquitted, Not long after that announcement, a radio news reporter said that people had begun rioting and that fires had been lit. I asked the staff to leave work early that day. When I got into my car west of Wilshire and Western, I saw black smoke billowing into the air. There were fires on Western Avenue. When I got onto the Hollywood Freeway to take the Pasadena north, I saw other fires throughout the city.

About a year later, I was approached by a coalition of Asian American organizations to consider becoming a co-chair at Rebuild LA. I later accepted and started working there in May/June. In my first year there, the nonprofit went through several reorganizations. Later, Linda Griego was recruited to become its new CEO; and a new revitalization strategy was launched, focusing on existing small manufacturing firms in underserved communities throughout LA County.

As a 25 year old, my first vivid memory of my hometown is of a city in turmoil and divided by race. 20 years have gone by since the riots happened and when asked, what my memories of those days are, I can vivid recall images that shaped my life. I recall my neighborhood which was in South Central Los Angeles burning, this time we were not scare of the gangs but of each other and what each person would do to protect their families. I recall people running through the streets with groceries, shoes, electronics, and anything else they could get their hands on. It presented how a society would function without rules or authority. At night all one could hear was sirens and people screaming for their lives. The neighborhood which I grew up in was burned, stores forced to close, and places like parks and churches which at one time represented safety and joy now where areas of destruction. I have will always remember the LA Riots it many ways it has define me and my generation, as the group of individuals who experienced what happens to a society when individuals are mistreated and racially profiled.

My husband and I were a young family then, pregnant with our first baby. We lived in an apartment in a rough part of North Hollywood. I remember hearing gunshots throughout the neighborhood, and the smell of our city burning. We slept on the floor next to our bed, away from the windows, for fear of stray bullets. We were terrified, and armed ourselves with a shotgun out of fear the unrest would not be brought under control.

We stayed at home for days, glued to the t.v., watching in disbelief as the city boiled over in crime and rage, fires and bullets. To restore order, the National Guard was brought in, and a sundown curfew set. Driving through the streets of the San Fernando Valley, and seeing armed Guardsmen looming in shop doorways, and patrolling the streets in military vehicles was an almost other-worldly experience. Instead of feeling safer, it just brought home how out of control the riots were. Everything seemed surreal.

My first son was born a few months after. I was so traumatized by the riots, that I suffered panic attacks when I drove anywhere with my newborn. I insisted we move shortly thereafter. We've been back many times, but it has never been the same.

I was born and raised in L.A., and I loved my city, but I never felt any pride in her after that. The darkness of that time will always live in my memories of the city of Angels.

My parents owned a neighborhood grocery store in the area for over 20 years. After closing time, we went home and saw the violence unfold on TV.

The next day, to be safe, we stayed at home and did not open for business the next day. Instead, we took the day off and watched the events unfold on television. As we turned the TV on the next morning, we saw to our dismay, our store burning down-20 years plus of blood sweat and tears. The following day after, we inspected the remains of the fire damage. No need to elaborate but there was absolutely nothing left standing but a burned out brick wall.

Those were rough years full of sorrow brought on by the prevalence of crack.

When the verdict was read, I was on the corner of Wilshire and Highland, having just come out of Kinkos. I was floored! Within hours, all hell broke loose. I drove back to my home in Eagle Rock and turned on the TV, where John Singleton was being interviewed outside the Simi Valley courthouse. Then, of course, came Reginald Denny, right into our living rooms. I believe that a young woman had already been killed, I think she was the first one to die, but the Denny images will always sear themselves into my consciousness. I also remember watching a line of smoke snake north along Vermont Ave. as the fires made their way into Hollywood. I had a show that night at Al's Bar, we were doing a five minute play festival. Needless to say it was harrowing. Afterwards, the police department building near city hall was attacked. On the news were several members of our theater troop engaging in the revolt. It was surreal. I came home and turned on the news and realized I couldn't stay in that part of town. At that point, I got in my car and drove through the Valley to Santa Monica; for fear that all of Eagle Rock was going to be destroyed, even though it never even got close. As I stopped off at a 7/11 store in the valley, I remember that there were already 50 or so patrons buying up food and water, candy, chips, soda, anything they could get their hands on. The poor clerks were overwhelmed. I then came up over Laurel Canyon and onto Wilshire, where a carload of African American young men was moving in and out of traffic. While they did not approach my car, the look of rage on their faces was something I will never forget as well. I stayed in Santa Monica at a friend’s house for what seemed like a week, but I think it might have just been a few days.

After the riots had finally been quelled, the first image I remember in the media was Edward James Olmos sweeping up the streets, by himself, on TV. It was one of the strangest and most haunting images I remember. Of course, then a few weeks later, or days, who can remember, the National Guard troops occupied downtown. I actually went to concert at the music center a few nights later and had to pass some tanks in the streets, giving me a significant appreciation for those societies that had been invaded or occupied themselves.

That began a two-year period, culminating in the Northridge Quake and O.J. Simpson. I always can tell the difference between my friends who lived here in LA and those who came from elsewhere after that time. They will never understand what we lived through. The baptism of fire, literally, is something that will always define my Angeleno heritage. They smile at me with a blank unknowing that I reciprocate, with the wisdom of one who knows. Our 911, to be sure.

We were at the Dodger's game the night the riots began. As we left Chavez Ravine we saw black columns of smoke rising south of downtown and had no idea what they were. A quick turn to the news stations let us know. We lived in Venice at the time, on a partially gentrified street that backed up to Abbot Kinney. That night we could hear gun fire coming from the Oakwood neighborhood behind Abbot Kinney. The next night, our nerves frayed, we packed our dog, cats, art work and photos and drove to my parent's home in Encino. It was night time, past the curfew and we were the only ones on the 405. As surreal as it was to be the only car on the freeway, it was even stranger to top the crest near Mulholland and look into the Valley below. No smoke, no sirens,just twinkling lights and clear, peaceful air. After the riots we learned to shoot a 9mm handgun and shotgun knowing no one would come if we needed help It was not the life we wanted. The next year we left Venice for good, moved to Encino just 3 minutes from my parents and never looked back.

I was Gov. Pete Wilson's former deputy press secretary and have so many vivid memories of that day. I remember watching the verdict come in with others in the Governor's press office and all of us remarking that trouble was sure to come that day and watching in horror Reginald Denney getting assaulted and wondering where the police where and hearing the Gov. get the recommendation to put the National Guard on alert. I remember LAX getting closed down and the only way for the advance team to get to LA from Sacramento was to commandeer a private airplane and divert it to carry us down there. I remember flying in a National Guard helicopter over the city, seeing fires and mile long lines of CHP coming down from the north. I remember being in the City Hall command center where LAPD chief Gates and Mayor Bradley finally met face to face since the riots started. I remember walking through a deserted Century City hotel looking for towels since there was no staff. I remember the Gov. being on the phone with the National Guard when hearing the incredible news that the Guard had not deployed yet because there was no ammunition and ordering them out with what they had on them. I remember getting yelled at by a Congressman in front of news cameras because I wouldn't let him into a meeting with local mayors, the Gov, and President Bush. I remember sitting in a car at an intersection watching looters burn a strip mall and a State Police officer asking me if I knew how to use a gun. I remember the relief when I finally got to go home after five days in the city I grew up in.

I was working in Westwood when I looked out my south-facing window and saw smoke from several sources in the direction of my condo at LaCienga and Rodeo Road. I left early and went home. That afternoon my wife and I watched the looting at the FedCo store across the street - both on TV and out our front window. That night and several nights thereafter, our homeowners association had resident volunteers patrolling the complex 24 hours a day, armed. We knew the "friendlies" by the black armbands we all wore, including those worn by our neighbor's two pugs who accompanied him on his perimeter patrol. We encountered no problems in our complex.

I was a Sheriff Sergeant at Lynwood Sheriffs Station on Bullis Rd. Given a team of deputies I deployed into the Willowbrook area the morning following the tragic day the riots began. We were flagged down by three black women who appeared to be in ther forties though I am not good with the ages of females. We were at a fairly major intersection. One lady asked us to help an asian woman who had been dropped of by her husband that morning to mind their small market; one similar to many that were operated in that area, often by asian owners. The black ladies feared for the safety of the asian lady who they described as being very afraid and with reason considering the events that were occuring. I assigned a sheriffs unit to drive the asian lady to Lywood Sheriffs Station where she could contact her husband and arrangement could be made. Before I left, I commented that I was afraid the store would not be there in the morning. The black lady who initially contacted us said that it would. She stated that the asian store owner had always been good to themin that neighborhood. Letting them buy items on a tab and working with there soemtimes shaky economic situations. She said there would be no damge by any "young punks" and she was there to make sure of that. Her claim was immediately backed by the other two women. I told them to be careful and advised them we would check on them periodically. We did and I explained the situation to my replacement ot came on at 6 pm that evening. Returning the following morning with my team of ten deputies, I noticed they were anxious to get out into the field. When I asked what their hurry was, they replied we have to got check on those ladies at the store. I then noticed that we all shared the same thought. We immediately drove to the store in Willowbrook. Upon arrival we saw the black ladies setting around a burning fifty-five gallon drum that was being used for warmth. They appeared tired from their all night ordeal. We got out and saw the store was intact without any damage at all. We asked them if anyone had attempted to break into the store as most in the area had been looted and vandalized. She just smiled and said they "took care of business". They all were holding some type of stick, 2x4, or baseball bat. We all smile and I congradulated them on their success. We left advising them we would continue to check on them, which we did over the next few days. I really don't believe we were needed because they had it under control.

This incident spoke more to human character than any who took advantage of the situation simply to steal what did not belong to them. Those black women were not on the high end of the social economic scale but they definitely top the character scale. I loved them.

I was at a friends house on 96th, watching the the coverage of the verdict when the images from Florence and Normandie began to be broadcast and realized I'd have to pass through that intersection to return home. I decided to take an alternate route, since I'm a white guy and I thought I might be targeted like Reginald Denny. On the way back to my apartment in Beverly Hills, I stopped to see my 12 year old, biracial daughter at Midtown Bowling Alley at Pico and San Vincente. When she saw me, with a terrified look on her face she exclaimed, "Daddy, you've got to go home -- they're killing white people!" It broke my heart to leave her fearing for my life (she was living with her grandparents at the time). When I got home, I went to the roof and watched as plume after plume of smoke rose into the sky; from what was then the Federated department store at La Cienega and Rodeo Rd. in Baldwin Hills to a series of other buildings being set ablaze in what seemed like a slow march north towards Beverly Hills. Fir a while, I actually considered the possibility of having to flee. I was just as angry about the verdict as those rioting, but I knew at that point, nobody would care.

In the days after the riot ceased, I remember being shocked at the carnage as I drove down Western Ave. But I found it even more disturbing to see National Guard troops with automatic weapons posted throughout the area. For the first time in my life, I realized what it felt like to live in a war zone and how our country seemed to be fighting it's own citizens. Today, in the wake of the murder of Trayvon Martin, I realize the battle is still raging.

I remember looking out my kitchen window in Lakewood, and seeing the smoke from the fires burning in south-central Los Angeles rising in the sky. I remember driving home from my mother's house and seeing the Lakewood Mall and all surrounding businesses shut down. I remember my sister and mother not thinking it was safe for me to drive up to LAX to take a flight to Ireland. I remember an Irish cop, after finding out where I was from, telling me I was safe now that I was in Ireland.

I used to work in Culver City and live in Pico Rivera. Back then, very few people had cell phones. Most mobile phones were actually car phones that you could not carry with you. Beepers/Pagers were a popular form of communication.

The 105 Freeway had not opened yet so, for me, getting from Pico Rivera to Culver City and back meant commuting via Florence Avenue and Centinella Avenue.

I remember listening to the verdict on the radio with my fellow co-workers. Other than Mr. Lewis (my fellow colleague) and myself, everyone in the office was white (I am Hispanic). Once the verdict was read, Mr. Lewis (African-American) joked that everyone better be scared on their way home. We all laughed.

I had just gotten a CD player installed in my car so I didn't listen to the radio. I was driving West on Centinella Ave. approaching Florence Ave. when my father beeped/paged me 911. I stopped at a payphone to call him back. He asked me where I was and when he learned of my location, he told me to go to the San Fernando Valley and to stay at a motel. I asked why and he told me about the riot.

When I got back to my car, I listened to the radio and realized how bad things were. I went back to the office and contemplated on what to do. Eventually I drove South on Sepulveda Blvd., South on the 405 Freeway and North on the 605 Freeway to get home. While traveling on the 405 Freeway, I saw black smoke arising from many areas. Military HumVees were also making their way via center dividers and shoulders. The trip took over three hours.

Once home, I saw the replays of the beating of Reginald Denny at the corner of Florence and Normandy, an intersection I drove by on that very morning and was to approach had my father not beeped me.

Thinking it was a one night occurance, I went to work the next day via the 605/405/Sepulveda path. However, after a few hours at the office we got word that there was a shooting at the Fox Hills Mall (a short walk from the office). A fellow colleague called corporate and we were told to close up and go home.

I hope it never happens again.

I was a National Guardsman deployed from Santa Barbara the second day after the riot started. It was very spooky the first time we drove into downtown. The Santa Monica Freeway was completely deserted except for us and our CHP escorts, as we headed towards the billowing black smoke; it reminded me of a post-apocalyptic movie.

Korea Town was deserted when we got there except for Korean shop owners guarding their property, the LAPD, and the occasional Gang-Banger driving around looking for easy prey. The residents and LAPD were very happy at our presence; they were dead tired after almost 3 days without sleep.

Each LAPD cruiser was reinforced by a National Guard Soldier with a M-16. We didn't have to do that much to help, but it was a real morale booster for the Police. They had a second set of eyes, someone to talk to... and an automatic weapon. We could no longer support the LAPD when we were federalized, directing a great deal of LAPD anger towards Governor Pete Wilson. He requested that the National Guard be federalized, not realizing that Posse Comitatus allowed State military forces to aid the police, but not federal military forces.

We were constantly harassed by Gang-Bangers. They didn't believe we had ammunition for our weapons because that is what the local media kept publishing. They would slowly drive by, point their fingers as a figurative gun, and tell us that they would be back that night because they knew we didn't have ammo. It wasn't until a Gangster attempting to run over a Soldier was shot and killed by a National Guardsman that the media and Gang-Bangers realized that we were armed, supplied, and prepared to engage.

I worked in the Delta Air Lines' control tower atop Terminal 5 at LAX. We operated 110 flights a day, including hourly Las Vegas flights. With the fires raging across the city, rioters began shooting at airplanes approaching the airport. We cancelled 55 flights the second day. Airplanes leaving LAX were taking off toward the ocean, as normal, but flights coming into LAX were approaching from the ocean simultaneously.

From my home in San Pedro, we looked north at night and saw the fires dotting the basin. It was a very frightening time.

I had just moved to Los Angeles from the UK six months before the riots -- I was aware of the Rodney King beating, which had been covered by the English news, but was not following closely the trial that was going on. I had just finished a job and had a few days off while I registered with temp agencies and looked for work. On the first evening, some friends and I drove up to Mulholland Drive, from where we could see some fires down in South Central, and it seemed unfortunate but remote. The next morning there was ongoing coverage on TV as events spread further, and oddly I remember thinking it seemed significant that there was talk about the Beverly Center closing early.

My friends called and said, since I was new in town and didn't know a lot of people, I was welcome to come and stay with them in Burbank, but it all still seemed quite remote. I lived on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, and as I left my apartment that afternoon to go to the grocery store, the street was jammed with cars heading for the onramp to the 101 Freeway north. Once I was struck by the realization that the populace was fleeing, I became more panicked, and I refugeed up to Burbank for a couple of days.

As it all played out -- the sense of unpredicatably spreading violence, the media hype, the curfew, the stores running out of food and ATMs running out of money -- it seemed not just dreadful but surreal. And then like a violent thunderstorm it passed. One of my friends said "Nothing will ever be the same again", and I remember wondering if this was true or if the old status quo would soon return.

I lived in Orange County so I wasn't directly impacted until I drove to San Francisco about 4 days after the riots started. On that long trip I saw miles after miles of National Guard convoys streaming south into the smokey LA basin. Those trucks were loaded with men and women preparing to invade the metropolitan area. In fact the word "invasion" stuck with me over the hours of driving when another convoy appeared, kind of like what was seen in the old WWII movies as GI's raced across Europe on those old 8 wheeler canvas covered trucks.

When I returned home a few days later, the smoke from all of the fires had mostly cleared and the riot subsided but those troops were there. Later I went into a gun shop in Orange County to buy my first pistol directly due to the inability of local law enforcement to contain the violence. I was hardly alone in that shop. It was crowded with men and women inquiring about purchasing a firearm.

I was a second-grader at 32nd Street that year. My apartment building was near the corner of Hoover and Adams and from our roof, we could actually see the looters and the flames from the shopping complex across from us. My school had a peace rally when classes resumed and I remember news crews coming to film us. My parents and teachers were so full of encouragement and positivity at the time, that I never felt afraid or in danger. But looking back I think how wild it all was in our neighborhood at that time. Having to educate second-grade students about race and equality, hate and violence, about community and friendship across all color lines seem like such heavy topics! But the lessons learned that year have stayed with me and have definitely shaped my views as an adult.

20 years ago during that time I was ready to shoot the first LAPD officer that I came in contact with after previous negative encounters with them. One night I was stopped by a LAPD officer for some sort of traffic issue and I immediately thought out a scenario to "harm him". Instead the officer- was a true professional and explained why he stopped me. It taught me not to broadbrush them.

I worked for a bank in downtown Los Angeles, where I commuted from Long Beach on the Blue Line every day. On the night the riots broke out, I unwittingly decided to go to the main library after work to finish some research I was working on. The library was in a temporary facility closer to the LA Times Building in those days.

As I left the library at closing - at around 9 pm - I could sense something was going on as I walked the six blocks or so back to the Blue Line station for my commute back to Long Beach, completely unaware of the riots breaking out across the city.

On my Blue Line ride home, wearing my usual 3-piece banker suit and silk tie, and reading the newspaper, I found that I was the only rider on the train except a couple of young men on the train talking loudly and with bravado that they were going to beat up the first white guy they saw - for which I conveniently matched their description.

I just kept my cool thinking that it was just talk, still unaware of the situation that had exploded in the neighborhoods the Blue Line traveled through. While the young men never actually confronted me, I thought for a moment that I might actually get beat up on the train or in the parking lot where my car was waiting.

Needless to say, I got home unscathed and was quite surprised when I got home and turned on the news to see what was going on.

The next day, I skipped the train and drove to my office on the 30th floor of our bank building. I couldn't help but be sad for Los Angeles that day, looking out the windows on each of the four sides of the building and seeing the fires and smoke coming from hundreds of buildings spread across every corner of the entire city, thinking it looked like a scene from a war movie.

We sent everyone home at noon that day. Three days later, I was back on the Blue Line, which I rode everyday for the remainder of my assignment in downtown Los Angeles.

I remember being sent home from work early on the first day. As I was driving home on the 101, I saw the horizon was a red glow from all of the fires. Then the next morning I woke up to my neighbor's car being stolen. I ran up stairs to call the police. They told me that they were only responding to life or death situations. It was very frightening, to say the least.

1992...I was 13 years old. Our family had a liquor store on Hoover and Florence ave-tom's liquor #1, exactly one block from where it all started...where r. Denny was beaten and looting was witnessed on live tv at tom's liquor #2. My father closed shop...my parents and I gathered in front of tv to watch live updates. Tom's liquor #2 was one of first stores to go up in flames. My mother, my father, and I witnessed it on live tv. I saw my father cry for the 1st time in my life...imagine the emotions we were going through...I haven't seen my father shed a single tear ever since...

I was 11 years old, living in an apartment complex in the Crenshaw district on Florence and 10th Avenue with my Mom, siblings and stepfather.

The trial was on every major news station, and the whole city was tuned in. It was a nice sunny afternoon in spring, and all the kids were out of school by this time.

We were having issues with our telephone line earlier that week, so my Mom scheduled in home maintenance with Pacific Bell.

A tall slender white man with shoulder length blonde hair, blue eyes, and a thick mustache, came to work on the phone line. My mother greeted him when she opened the door and showed him the phone jack.

He finished repairing the phone jack exactly at the moment they announced the not guilty verdict in the police trials for the Rodney King beating.

As the technician packed up his tools and walked out of our apartment, he was immediately attacked in the courtyard by members of Rolling 60s Crips.
They broke his nose as they punched and kicked him to the ground. Miraculously, he escaped and immediately ran back to our apartment. He banged on the door screaming for help. As my mother opened the door, he fell inside to the floor and cried out, “They broke my nose!” My mom got some towels and showed him to the bathroom, while she called 911.

After the paramedics came to get him, rioting exploded in the neighborhood.

During the 6 days of rioting, firecrackers were ignited at our door to scare us, and we received death threats.

When the rioting declined, threats to our family died down, but teasing and taunting continued well after the incident, until finally my family relocated to another neighborhood.

My Moms decision to help the technician was a very pivotal moment in my life.

I witnessed my mother’s outrage at the Rodney King beating and the officers’ acquittal, however, at the same time, she taught me how empathy supersedes hatred.

Because my mother came of age during the civil rights movement, and experienced countless incidents of prejudice and discrimination, she has a heightened sensibility to injustices inflicted on the African-American population. However, in spite of the violence she witnessed growing up, she never let it compromise her humanity.

I worked at the Queen Mary in Long Beach during that time. We were evacuated from the ship on April 30 and May 1, because we were told that if the rioting spread in Long Beach, we'd be cut off with no way to get out.

I remember a couple of things in particular: I was disgusted that people in Long Beach -- really, nowhere near the main rioting -- decided to join in and start looting and burning stores and the DMV. None of them seemed concerned about what the rioting was about -- they only cared to treat private property like a grab bag. I remember one of my co-workers saying he drove past an Long Beach store where "everyone was running out carrying a package of diapers and a VCR."

May 1 was my birthday, and I had to renew my license. I lived in Huntington Beach at the time, so I went to the DMV in Westminster, only to find that all the patrons were required to wait in the parking lot, and only one person was allowed at a time for each customer service window. There was to be no waiting for your number to be called -- you were to stand in line in the parking lot. This was a direct result of the Long Beach DMV being burned down -- another stupid, cowardly act that had nothing to do with anything.

My most important memory from the riots came when we were being evacuated from the Queen Mary on May 1. Several of us lived in Orange County, and we convoyed home together so as to make sure everyone got home safely. We drove on Pacific Coast Highway rather than the freeway, and I distinctly remember the tension and fear we all felt as we drove through downtown Long Beach's silent, deserted streets not knowing what might be happening around any given corner.

Incredibly, when we crossed over the city limits from Long Beach into Seal Beach I saw mothers with the children strolling along the sidewalks, people at the beach, stores with open doors and customers coming and going. This rioting stuff was not going to be tolerated in Orange County -- it was a world away.

I realize the problems of L.A. are different than those in Orange County, but not everyone in O.C. is rich and beautiful -- there are problems, poverty, and racial issues there as well. However, the difference I perceived that day was that there were people who realized the value of their communities and did not strive to destroy them as those who were rioting did. There are better ways to fight injustice, and destroying one's own home was certainly not effective.

My family and I live in Colorado now, and I remember telling my husband that day that I would never willingly live in Los Angeles County again. I wish that people took more pride in their community during those days and raised one another up instead of brought one another down. We've been gone from Southern California for 13 years now, and I was saddened that day by the actions of so many. I remain saddened as I read how so much of California is no longer the place where I grew up -- a place where more people cared about each other. In many ways, I think that decline began with the L.A. Riots.

At that point in time, I was 7 years old. All I'd known for that short period of my life was the 3 mile radius surrounding the Pico-Union area where I was born and raised. Most of the world was foreign to me, even the extents of my own city. Power (and by definition race) dynamics were not even registered in my consciousness. I remember one Saturday afternoon as my sister and I were watching television, there was a thunder of chaos brewing outside our 50 unit, brick-masonry building--where scores of other immigrant families lived as well. As we sat there lulled by far-removed children's animation, the world directly across our street was animated by the sacking, looting and torching of our two neighborhood staples: a liquor store and a 99-cent store.

When we realized something was amiss, my sister and I were forbidden from stepping anywhere near our front lobby. Though my parents stepped outside, they never became participators. They were simply spectators. The Pandora's Box of curiosity had been triggered--except now it was reversed: the viewing was not the causal agent, the cause itself, albeit political, was begging a viewing. Possibly because he understood the enormity of the situation, my dad agreed to allow the both of us to take a peek at some point, and once we did, we were confronted by a spectacle of flames and a dispersing crowd of looters nearly tripping over their stolen goods. Even the most familiar had now become extremely foreign to me and my limited, innocent concept of moral right and wrong was muddled by the overriding lawlessness.

20 years later, those very same stores have regenerated and are again thriving. Granted they have not been inflamed once more, the hazy ash of the nebulous concept of race now lingers in me.

In April 1992, I was working LAPD Pacific Homicide with my partner, Brian Carr. I was the junior partner, having 2 years of homicide experience; Brian had several more years in the specialty and on the job.

The day the riot started was a busy one for us. We were trying to “make” a case on an old unsolved Pacific homicide, and Brian was helping me prepare for trial on a death penalty case. Although we were in and out of station that day, we both noted there seemed to be tension everywhere we went.

In the afternoon, while in the station squad room, I remember someone yelled, “They’re reading the verdict!” I went to Lieutenant Ross Moen’s office, where he kept an old black and white console TV. The small room was jammed with people, all eyes trained on the flickering image. We heard the verdicts read and I recall saying out loud, “Thank God.” I thought everything would go back to “L.A.normal.” How wrong could I have been?

Going back in the squad room (that held about 40 persons) should have been an indicator that something was amiss. Cops (and detectives in particular) are usually on the same page about law and order issues. Not this time. Most people were verbal, praising the system. The rest were sullen, just looking down at their desks. A few left for the day, even though it was early. Another warning of a future problem, that went ignored.

Brain and I got right back to business. We had assembled a photo line-up card that included a suspect we thought may be involved in the old unsolved case. The witness that we wanted to show the card to lived in Southwest Los Angeles. With Brian driving, we took our unmarked Chevy Impala from our west side location on the twenty mile round trip.

The traffic was unusually busy and there seemed to be a lot of people out walking. We drove on surface streets teeming with traffic. I turned the AM radio on in the car and heard the recording of the verdicts being read over and over again. I wondered if they were going to replay the verdicts as many times was they showed the beating video.

As were drove south towards Coliseum Avenue, I saw some cars and a tractor-trailer stopped mid block. Getting closer, I saw a group of twenty people in roadway. Some were throwing things at the cars and truck. Almost at the same time, the police radio exploded with requests for back-up. The riots had started and we drove right into it.

I sounded the siren and most of the group ran out of the street. The cars and trucks drove on. A few stood defiantly in the street. I remember being stopped in the police car, looking at the people in the street, maybe seeing who would do what next. The police radio then gave us direction, ordering all personnel to their stations. It was the start of a full scale mobilization, where all Department personnel are activated.

Brain had recently been transferred to Pacific from South Bureau Homicide, and he still had a locker there. As that station was relatively close, we decided to go there and gather additional weapons and ammunition.

Several things stand out on the trip to Brian’s locker. The first was a speeding motorist driving the opposite direction on Stocker. He slowed when he got parallel to our car, and looked directly at us. He then accelerated away, perhaps in anger, maybe in protest. I guess I’ll never know.

The second was when we were in the parking lot at South Bureau. A 30-something Black woman drove up next to me and asked if she could talk. By then I was wearing a ballistic vest and “Police” windbreaker. The woman asked me, “How can I ever trust the police again, after the verdicts?” I really didn’t know how to answer her and took a few seconds to respond. I saw that she was about the same age as my wife, and was driving the same make of car. In the back seat was child in a car seat, about the same age as my daughter. I told her of the similarities and asked her to try for the sake of both our families. I asked her to stay in the parking lot, but she said she had to get home. I hope that she made it home that night.

When we got back to Pacific Station, everyone was gone but for Lieutenant Moen. He had Brian and I recall all detective personnel. There were a few that did not answer their phones, and a few that were slow to respond. They were the ones in the squad room that were silent or left early after the verdicts.

Brian and I worked 24 hours that day and were the only ones allowed to remain in a detective function. We were assigned to “B” Shift (6 p.m. to 6 a.m.) for the duration of the riots: two weeks, no days off. The remainder of the detective squad was ordered into uniform patrol around the City.

I recall the weeks following that first night as “Reality Twilight Zone.” Brian and I were responsible for investigating all major crimes in Pacific’s area. We investigated two murders that were riot-related, including an arson case that was never solved. In what little spare time we had, we drove through the hardest hit areas of the City. The burning buildings, smoldering cars and blow torch broken gas lines seemed like a giant movie set. Except what I saw was real.

We had missed a lot of indicators in the months that preceded the verdicts. The resulting riots gave Los Angeles a scar for all to see. Seeing the military armed with automatic weapons standing on the streets that I police made me think that we didn’t protect and serve very well. I hope that we never see those times again.

Having said that, I would be remiss if I did not mention that was then and this is now. The City is safer and the LAPD has reinvented itself. In the past few years, both Brian and I retired. After serving the City for 32 years, I am proud to say that Los Angeles is better than when I started. I have no doubt it will stay that way.

Los Angeles is not an integrated city, at least not in any way that was meaningful to me when I was in my twenties.

I had been there seven years, but I still felt like I was on the outside looking in. At the telegenic people on Malibu beach, umbrellas punctuating their idyllic afternoons like candy colored exclamation points. At the homes in Pacific Palisades where I arranged buffets and calmed rich housewives as a party waiter. I had never been invited to the Academy Awards.

Los Angeles is a place where it feels like anything could happen, but it's also a place where it feels like nothing is ever going to.

Suddenly I was on the inside looking out.

The Rodney King verdict had been announced, and the response was furious. The response to the response was a citywide curfew from dusk until dawn. I stayed put as directed. I shuttled between staring out the window at my apartment courtyard and staring at the continuous coverage of the riots on TV. A white chick under glass.

"You looked so trapped," my neighbor, a shorter, blonder Kyle Maclachlan, commented as he breezed past my open window, heading out to defy curfew yet again.
"We're not supposed to go out," I called after him, wishing desperately that he would take me wherever he was going.

I wasn't just trapped in my apartment, I was trapped in general.

Los Angeles is a great place for yearning, and boy, did I ever. For a band to help me launch my as-yet-nonexistent singing career, for a job other than temping and cater waitering, for the neighbor guy to finally notice me.

"I know I keep calling, but are you sure you're okay?" my mom laughed nervously on the phone from Minneapolis. "On TV the fires look close to where you are."
I could smell smoke in the air, but to tell the truth I didn't even recognize the broadcast images of Florence and Normandy. A series of maps superimposed over a real-time feed of bombed-out buildings and chaos in the streets showed me where the flashpoint street corner was in relation to me, but it may as well have been in another country. One where there was a war going on.

My life was strictly Westside, with the notable exception of work, which was currently Mid Wilshire. I was temping at Southwestern Law School and occasionally serving cream tea and champagne at the art deco landmark I. Magnin next door.

I loved my Southwestern assignment. There was always free parking nearby because the street was lined with crack houses that any sane motorist avoided. I worked with a great woman my age named W. She was really educated and had perfect skin the color of coffee with a splash of cream. She had been an actress but wasn't pursuing it anymore even though she had once won a regional Emmy in the Pacific Northwest.

Even splicing together the money from two jobs, I could barely afford my oatmeal-drab apartment under the 10 Freeway. W was making even less than I was. We bonded.

We used to eat lunch in the school's courtyard and talk about creative visualization and affirmations, as if by stating our wishes out loud we could somehow convince the universe to give us a break, already.

By day four of the riots the gas stations had run out of gas. The grocery stores were packed but everything else was closed. Melrose merchants took rifles to the rooftops defending their boutiques. An overtaxed National Guard turned people away from the beaches. It was like the Wild West but trendy. Looters of all ages and colors shouted expletives and saluted TV cameras with one finger as they made off with diapers and TVs and bottles of Scotch. Somebody stole Madonna's bustier from the Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie museum. The old I. Magnin was ravaged and, sadly, never did really recover.

After five days of angry chaos, order got a foothold or maybe people just became exhausted, but the destruction finally stopped. We went back to work, back to life. It was Cinco de Mayo.

That day sitting with W in the Southwestern Law School courtyard at a well-meaning but depressing Mexican buffet the school had provided, I realized that this was probably going to be the extent of my Los Angeles integration: eating refried beans and chicken tacos with my black friend while celebrating Mexico's Independence on a patio between a wrecked blue-blood department store and a row of crack houses.

In a way that was uniquely L.A., it was inspiring. I felt hopeful for the first time in ages.

I got my courage up and put an ad in Music Connection looking for a band. I even got my blond Kyle Maclachlan, at least for that summer. W moved on to a job that paid eight times what she had been making as a temp at the law school.

And the stunned city started to assess its damage?financial, political, emotional. And broken but not destroyed, Los Angeles slowly began to pull itself back together.

I was in the third grade enrolled in a Korean American school in Los Angeles. My father and I immigrated to Los Angeles from South Korean in 1989.

My teacher Ms. Fernandez had mentioned something about the Rodney King incident. I didn't pay much attention. I felt that I didn't really have to. It was about four white officers who beat a black man. What did this have to do with me? I am not black. I am not white.

Then they were acquitted.

All hell broke loose.

Since 1989, my father and my grandmother resided in Pico Union, a neighborhood of recent Mexican and Central American immigrants. It was a two-story building. The residents were all Korean in a largely Latino neighborhood. Pico Union's residents are mostly Latino. So on weekends, you could rancher music of accordion and wailing sounds of ranchero from the next door apartment.

My dad came home with a swollen bump on his lip.

Naturally, we all asked, our eyes fixated on the enlarged red bump, what happened. Someone threw a crate at him while he was driving.

My father at the time was working at a swap meet in South LA on Slauson Boulevard.

My dad had a tiny space in the swapmeet of sportswear knock-offs. It was walled off. All day long, the nextdoor retail space which sold audio equipment played the 90s hit “OPP, Yeah, You know me.”

Someone threw a crate at him because he looked Korean and he was.
The masses then seemed to target Koreans.

I was utterly confused. Wasn't the Rodney King incident comprised only of black and white individuals. What did Koreans have to do with it all?

Years later, I found out about Latasha Harlins. A Korean woman accused Latasha of stealing orange juice. An argument ensued. The Korean woman shot Latasha Harlins who then died.

Then, all sorts of buildings in Koreatown were getting burned. The burning images would appear on the news. A white electronics store that was in walking distance was burned.

There was looting.

My dad's younger brother, who has the traditional title of “little dad” in Korean, had his store in South LA burned to the ground. It was a store where I had hanged out doing my homework and was a place of daycare. It was an indoor playground.

Suddenly, my dad said one afternoon that it was too dangerous for me to go to school.

My dad doesn't believe in sick days. Even if you were coughing up mounds of mucus or blood or were dying of a terminal illness, my dad believes you should die educated. You always had to go to school.

So I knew it was really terrible when my dad--a man of Korean tradition who upheld education and teachers as saints--said it was too dangerous for me to go to school.

As an only child, I liked school. It was where I met my friends.

The next couple of weeks were so boring. We never turned on the lights because we feared that the lights would indicate to the masses that we were home. We felt that we had to hide in silence and darkness like the family of Anne Frank.

Then, my father, as a worker of the swap meet was asked to guard the swap meet from looters and potential arsonists.

He had to leave each night.

Night was so frightening. And every night my dad wasn't home.

Every day, I had my worst fears come back to me of my dad getting shot or lynched just because he was Korean on his way to the swap meet. My fears played such lurid images in my mind.

I was not to sleep in my bed in my bedroom. In case of the apartment getting burned to the ground, I had to sleep in the living room, which was closer to the exit for such emergencies.

I put a cover of bed sheets on the living room floor and I got my pillow and blankets from the bedroom and I slept in the living room.

My grandmother would stay awake and listen to the radio. There were news coverage of where the next fire would hit. We were always afraid that the fire would come close or that we would be the next target.

We lived in the second floor apartment. The next door unit was unoccupied.
I asked my grandmother, What's going to happen if they burn our apartment?

My grandmother said, "The next door apartment has go-chu-gga-ru. And we can throw those in their eyes if they try. We have jars and jars."

Go-chu-gga-ru was the pungent red spice used to make spicy kimchi. Who knew that a spice could be used as a defense weapon? This was the back-up plan?!

I then began to miss school and began to get mad at the grownups. Why wasn't anyone doing anything? Didn't they care that innocent people and their businesses and homes were getting burned.

I had to ask everyday, Why did they hate us? What did we do that was so terrible?
I was utterly even more afraid. It was no secret that our apartment was full of Koreans. If the masses wanted to target Koreans, all they had to do was to burn down this apartment.

The National Guard finally arrived.

I had heard that there was a parade for peace. My Korean teacher at my church had asked, "Why weren't you there?"

I was too scared. I had gotten used to the fear and hiding in my home. By then, I didn't believe it. It was too good to be true. But peace was real because my dad finally took me back to school. It was a sweet homecoming to see my friends and teacher.

I am twenty-eight years old now. I have never experienced a fear so dreadful as the one I had experienced as a child during the L.A. Riots. I am still haunted by Latasha Harlins. I am unsure of how to honor her.

My wife and I arrived home at 5:30 in the evening, unaware of the magnitude of the spreading chaos. Our housekeeper was in tears because the bus service had been cancelled and she wanted desperately to go home to her family. The problem was she lived at Slauson and Normandie - just north of the riot's flash point. I agreed to drive her home but I would stick to the freeways and avoid the streets at all cost. Getting to the 10 freeway, I past cars loaded with stolen goods from the nearby Target store. We drove past a burning furniture outlet. The heat so intense it felt like the flames were licking our faces. I drove until it seemed like we were in Whittier and then I dropped off the housekeeeper. Now I could concentrate on returning home. On the 10 freeway I counted fifteen separate fires. The freeway was empty and I was speeding at 95 miles an hour. A police cruiser passed me like I was standing still. The patrolman and I had the same idea - get home as fast as possible!

I remember watching TV and seeing my neighborhood as if it were in a movie. People running from one store to the next. I was 14 years old and I remember having to ask my neighbor to let us ride with them to a grocery store far away from LA because all the grocery stores in the nieghborhood had been looted or burned down. It was scary, but I wasn't scared for me I was scared for the people that were out there. They didn't know what was going on just that it was free for all. Many people had no idea what it was about but that it was an opportunity for free stuff. People were taking out any and all anger they had and did not realize it was all self destruction. It was surreal I was scared for the people that were out there being knocked down by the police in riot gear. The most frightening and memorable time of all this was when the curfew was over and we all were forced to face reality. The reality of what had really happened to our community. I lived about 20 bliocks away from school. Store after store was burned down. Stores had shattered windows with only the metal railing protecting the debris that was left inside. I didn't know it at that time but it would take years for LA to be rebuilt. People must have thought that they were damaging the government but in reality they were only hurting those same people they thought they were standing up for, their neighbors. It reminds me of kids that use drugs or get pregnant just to show their parents they can do what ever they want. When in fact when it's all over with and all the fires are put out they realize they only damage their own lives.

I remember helping to protect Chapman Market on 6th. and Kenmore Ave., Los Angeles 90020. I was assisting the owners of Chapman Market during the riots. After everything was said and done. There was not ONE window broken at Chapman Market. The owner of a Pizza shop in Chapman Market and some friends of the Pizza owner and myself gathered all of our weapons that we had in our homes and brought them to Chapman Market. We deciede to protect the property from looters. When the riots were over and the owner of Chapman Market came the next day to check on his property, he was amazed that not ONE window was broken. There were five or six of us that had pulled this off and the owner rewarded us by giving us $150.00 each for the good work we had done. During the ordeal, LAPD had come onto the property to ask who we were and we notified them that we were there to protect the property. LAPD had inspected all of our guns and advised us to stay on the property at all times. The owner of the Pizza place used this tactic to keep the looters back from the property. He would sit on the roof facing 6th street and as the looters would get close to the property, he would shoot his shotgun into the air and everyone of the looters would scatter in all directions away from the property, because of the loud sound of the shotgun. Those are my memories of the riots.

I was only six at the time, but the severity of it all was burned into me. I lived close to the corner of Jefferson and Vermont, in South L.A., and experienced it all like any other Angeleno ... through the comfort of my television, of course. "Sunshine Supermarket," as well as other liquor stores along the Jefferson strip, were ablaze. I smelled the ash and saw the black plumes rising into the perfectly sunny skies, but ironically it didn't register until i saw a "birds-eye-view" of it all on the television screen. I still remember running into the T.V. room and seeing our beloved "Sunshine Supermarket" burning to the ground, that I realized how close we were to ground zero.

I don't remember feeling scared but i do remember feeling anxiously excited. You couldn't help but feel the power manifested through the heat and smell of the embers. I will always associate that smell ...

"They're not going to ask you your politics when they pull you from your car and beat the crap out of you"

There was a brutal silence on the phone for several long moments. I knew he was right and was immediately embarrassed by the relief I felt, like the feeling you get when you find out a snow day will delay the test you didn't prepare for. My father had never missed a day of work in his life, so notwithstanding his obvious paternal instincts, I trusted his judgment. For the last two years, I had never felt the slightest apprehension about driving to school, but that had all changed in less than 24 hours. The acquittal of the police who had beaten Rodney King and what ensued following that decision changed the drive to South Central and created a fear in me where there had been none.

I remember driving home from school the day before, listening to the news on the radio. The southern California sun is truly a force to be reckoned with but that day it was no match for my feelings of anger, frustration, sadness and guilt. That day the entire city of Los Angeles drove across an imaginary line that separates order from chaos, exploring a new dimension, a new reality, a moment that would shape our collective conscience forever. There was no fear, however. Perhaps it was swallowed by absolute indignation.

There was also no fear as Eric, Asher, Danny and I watched the events unfold on television from our apartment just five miles from the headquarters of the LAPD. As teachers with Teach For America, we had made a commitment to work diligently if at times naively to provide kids in under-resourced public schools with the opportunity for an excellent education. So, without a word, our collective experience as teachers on a mission propelled us down the old steel-door elevator at the Bryson, out the back door and into my Honda hatchback. We could not just simply watch; we were actors in this drama, this piece of history. On some level, it became obvious that this moment would not comfortably fade from either the news cycle or the front page of the LA Times any time soon.

I parked my car a half a block from the police headquarters which had become a symbol of this makeshift movement, a place where we could express our frustration and disappointment in the system's failure to hold the police accountable even in the face of obscenely excessive force. Someone had finally provided a window to the world that many poor and disenfranchised live in and in instead of opening their eyes, an impenetrable brick wall was erected in its place.

There were a group of about one hundred "concerned citizens" there to protest the jury's decision and more importantly the system that would allow those who had sworn to protect and serve but had done neither to go free. Through a green glass facade, we could see a couple of dozen officers in full riot gear protecting and serving the system. As we looked at this group of "LA's finest", a moment of hesitation came over me and I was afraid of what might happen next.

For as long as I could remember, I identified with the progressive movement and even marched in Washington against policies that kept marginalized populations entrenched in poverty. I aspired to what a professor of mine called "active citizenry" but on that day as LA spiraled into violence and confusion, my commitment to speaking for justice shifted from theory to practice.

Not surprisingly given its spontaneous nature, the protesters were simultaneously pulled in two directions, forced to choose between their more peaceful angels or their more destructive selves. Large, cement planters became stages as leaders stepped up to debate whether to respond carefully and peacefully or quickly and drastically. Television vans arrived on the scene and the police approached the growing throngs. As I watched the unrest down in south central through the window of one of the vans, I began to realize that this was going to get real ugly, real quick. Before I knew it, a policeman grabbed me by the collar of my denim jacket and pushed me out of the way.

The numbers of police had grown as the tension rose. Page 5 of the Manual for Squelching Civil Unrest must read, "When the sun begins to set and visibility is compromised, march through the densest part of the crowd and then half of the officers move one section of the crowd east while the other half move the remaining section toward the west." I started to feel I was in over my head and looked for my friends for strength or for solidarity of maybe just an acknowledgement that we needed to get the hell out of there. But, they were nowhere to be found. I was alone.

I ran to my car, as my personal panic seemed to be reflected in the faces and movements of other protestors around me. Since I had driven, it was my responsibility to find my friends. My heart beat feverishly as hundreds spilled into the streets trying to find a way out of downtown L.A. Amid the chaos reminiscent of the movie "Escape from New York", I drove and drove for what seemed like hours as I witnessed frustration and anger reach a boiling point and the police were powerless to respond to the recklessness of the people as they hurled newspaper boxes through windows and set fires in garbage cans. I remember thinking how thin a line it is that separates order and chaos, a disturbing fact that we push into the deepest recess of our unconsciousness.

I found one of my friends while the others had no choice but to walk home. As soon as we walked through the door, we were bombarded by images of what we experienced being broadcast around the world. We wondered if the people of Kuwait and Iraq felt the same about the coverage of the recent Gulf War. What possible context could people across the country put the morphed images of looting and rioting in Los Angeles? Over and over, the students and families we worked with and learned from were reduced to savage opportunists, setting fires and wreaking havoc.

That havoc is forever been branded in our brains in the image of Reginald Denny, the truck driver who ended up beaten as a bizarre, violent form of poetic vigilante justice or perhaps the people's answer to the system's miscarriage of justice. At that moment, watching the helicopter record each blow to his face, the writhing of his overwhelmed body, I could come to only one conclusion. For all intents and purposes, for that moment, I was Reginald Denny. While fear pumped through my veins in disbelief, I thought that maybe I finally could relate to the discrimination and stereotyping and racial associations that ignored everything in my heart and my soul in favor of my skin color.

I had spent the last two years learning and teaching in a place so different in many superficial ways but yet similar in almost every way that mattered. My life truly straddled two worlds in the same city. I aggressively taught kids in South Central that their voice mattered despite how often it seemed drowned out by low expectations and unintelligible, unwritten rules. I gently taught friends and others I would meet in coffee houses along Melrose Place that it was absurd to ask if I felt safe in the communities that my students and thousands like them lived in every day of their lives.

Los Angeles was filled with giant plumes of thick black smoke for days. Those were the worst. Looking south from our third floor balcony in West Hollywood, we marveled in horror as the smoke climbed thousands of feet into the sky, darkening the entire basin and approaching our area. It looked like 'Battle:LA.' The rioting never reached West Hollywood. Looking out at the hell LA had become, it was easy to believe the entire place could burn to the ground.

When martial law was declared, everyone cleared out the supermarkets. At our local Vons, the mood was tense but giddy, like shopping for a Superbowl during the apocalypse. "You can't have a riot without chip and dip!" I heard a neighbor joke. We added a box of donuts to our provisions and gave them to the soldiers in the tanks.

The second day of rioting found us packing our bags and getting out of town. We planned an escape to Joshua Tree. As we were leaving, calls rolled in from buddies planning the same thing. We spent the final days of the riot in the desert with a tribe of our friends, listening to the reports from the rugged comfort and safety of our campground.

I saw it first hand and up close. I had a five year old daugher who lived with her grandmother on Martin Luther King and Denker (deep center of the riots). I had to see about my baby. I got on my motorcycle and cruised through South Central. I was on Vernon and Vermont and saw folks raiding the pawn shop. In and out, In and out. No one was obeying the lights but everybody was slowing down before crossing. I saw one or two police cars but they were not stopping for nothing and no one. Western Surplus was a large surplus store where the community would normally purchase guns and ammo. It was gutted. Being there, I can only say it was like watching a slow motion movie.

Remember driving to my then home on Mount Washington from the South Bay and feeling the tension all around me. I was very upset myself about the trial verdict. After the civil unrest (riot) had calmed down a bit and I heard they were asking for volunteers to help in Diane Watson's district, I took my pickup truck down. They asked me to use it to help deliver supplies to stricken areas. At first they put a black young man with me (to protect my white self, I guess) but he was on Diane's staff and very busy so I soon was taking supplies all around the riot areas alone. I never was/felt threatened. When I got lost a couple of times, people were very helpful. Everyone was very kind. Diane Watson's staff was extremely organized and positive, BTW.

During the LA riots, I was 29 years old and living near Hancock Park with my wife, and working downtown as a lawyer. The day the riots really broke out I was litigating my very first trial in the downtown courthouse. I remember going back to my 8th floor office at lunch and watching the smoke flumes rising up from all around the city. It seemed to be distant and surreal, and I did not then feel affected at all. After lunch, all the parties reconvened at the courthouse, and the judge took the bench and announced dramatically, "Los Angeles is burning. There is no trial today. Everyone go home. But don't use 6th street. And don't use 3rd street. I'm leaving. Bye." And he bolted off the bench.

All of the lawyers and parties to the case -- who had been angrily averse to each other -- huddled together to plot their retreat home. I remember walking out of the eerily empty courthouse to the parking lot. There was no one on the streets of downtown until a couple riot-gear clad police officers came around the corner. They looked remarkably young and their eyes were very wide. One of them said, "Get out of here." I didn't need that.

I took Olympic home and drove past stores being looted near Koreatown. As I drove slowly by (way too slowly it seemed), and acutely aware of my collared shirt and lawyer tie, and as angry heads started to turn in my direction, I did feel a little uneasy.

When I got home, my wife was there, having come home from her job in Century City. She's not the type to be intimidated easily, but she was awfully quiet about what she saw on her drive. I said little about what I had seen. We walked out into the middle of the street where our neighbors had congregated to talk about the riots and what to do.

By that point, stores on 3rd Street and La Brea -- just a couple blocks away -- were burning and some men with guns appeared to be patrolling roofs. Local news seemed to indicate that access to the 10 south of us, as well as the 101 north of us, was essentially blocked off, so we were all essentially hunkered down. Driving east on side streets -- back from where I had just come -- seemed like a bad idea. West was no better. My anxiety level was starting to peak. I had quit drinking only a few years earlier, and, like the guy in "Airplane," was bemoaning to myself the bad timing of that decision.

Then, as this motley group of people standing in the middle of Mansfield Avenue started to buzz with fear, one of my neighbors -- an elderly woman who lived with her stroke-impaired husband -- piped up loudly. She said, "I've lived in this community for more than 40 years. We were here for the Watts riots. Pheh. This is nothing. Go back inside and eat some food. It'll be fine."

And she was right.

I remember coming home from work that afternoon to change clothes and meet my husband to attend a banquet that was being held at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. As we always did when we got home from work, we turned on the TV and saw the Rodney King incident unfold before us. We continued getting ready and left for the Biltmore. After arriving at the hotel, we chatted with colleagues, ate dinner and began listening to the speakers. At one point, a woman handed a piece of paper to the speaker who told us the Rodney King event earlier in the evening had begun to get out of control and we were to leave the hotel walking quickly and carefully to our cars and drive directly home. Nothing more and nothing less. We walked out the the Biltmore and across the street to Pershing Square Garage from where we began our drive home. We turned the car radio on and decided to take Wilshire Blvd instead of the Santa Monica Fwy. I remember as we turned onto Wilshire, there were many youths who were throwing bottles and rocks and were trying to get on top of the cars. As I think back, the drive seemed tense and endless. Fortunately, we arrived home safely. Once home, I called my mother who had been watching tv and was very frightened. We left the phone on and we spoke nearly all night long watching tv. Definitely a time to remember.

I have so many memories. At the time my I worked in Century City. When the verdict came I went home to change and drove to my church, First A.M.E. in Los Angeles. We had already made plans for the men of the church to go out into the streets to encourage people to remain calm along with men from other churches and community organizations. We did that for the better part of the next three days. There was nothing easy about that time. I still think we did some good and wonder how much worse things would have been without that effort.

I was 12 year veteran of a Central California City Police Department. 30 officers of my agency went to Los Angeles on the third day of the riots under a mutual aid agreement in California. I was a senior corporal on assigned to head one of 5 men teams. We were assigned to protect the firefighting agencies of our County headed to the same emergency.

As we travelled under the guidence and escort of the California Highway Patrol. We saw the fires coming from Los Angeles and the skyline looked red and smokey. It reminded me of a TV movie, "The Day After". Then I knew why we were asked to volunteer. The majority of the officers in our small platoon were LA area natives. I grew up in Long Beach in Naval Housing my mother and father worked in downtown Los Angeles at the time and I was familiar with the area.

As we entered the city, we were already given orders to help suppress the fires nearest us. As we arrived on scene to our first fire (Wilshire Blvd in Korea town), Our other units moved on along down the 110 freeway to other fires. There were five officers assigned to one fire apparatus and we were assigned to six fires in that long 18 hour day.

After, we were billeted at a motel in Orange County and eight hours of rest, we continued with a A/B shift system (12 hours on 12 hours off). For the next five days we just did our assignments and then went back to our medium sized Central Valley City.

What I remember most was that the people supported us and helped us, even bringing looters they caught themselves for us to arrest. I do know, that was the scariest time in my Law Enforcement career... After the LA riots and 24 years as a police officer, I appreciate the quiet life of a farmer in my home island of Guam.

At the time of the riots I was a freelance television news cameraman. While I was mostly working for KNBC, on the day the verdicts came in I was doing a day for KTTV. With the announcement that a verdict had been reached the news desk call me and told me to head to the Simi courthouse. I don't remember the reporter I was working with at the time, but neither one of us were happy. Getting in a media scrum outside the courthouse of a hi-profile trial is really no fun at all. When we arrived at the courthouse I took my spot in the crowd of cameramen, still photographers and reporters. Most of us knew each other. We stood around, chatting and wondering about the verdicts. It all seems very casual, but there's a tension underneath. Every body's eyes are scanning the courthouse doors looking for one of the defendants... You don't want to be the last one to spot them. It's impossible to get the shot you need, or a sound bite from the back of the pack. I got lucky. I spotted Stacy Koon exiting the courthouse with an escort of three sheriff's deputies. I slowly picked up my camera and eased in his direction. By the time the rest of the pack spotted him I was in front... prime position. The pushing and shoving and barked out questions and elbows started. I was right in Stacy's face with my lens. Things got really bad when the public looky-loos saw what was happening. Everybody wanted a piece of Mr. Koon. Some where yelling in support... racist stuff mostly. The larger portion of the crowd, however, wanted to taser and beat him. They were jumping on the backs of reporters and cameramen and pushing toward the sheriffs who were escorting him to his car. The deputies pulled out their night-sticks and started to swing them. Being as I was in front those clubs were getting very close to me. They managed to get the defendant into his car and he drove off. I worked for Fox until about 2am. At 4:30am I started my shift a KNBC and worked for about 3 days straight. I could fill a book with the sadness I witnessed; Three hundred foot flames coming out of TRAX auto store way down Rodeo; a 5 year old girl wandering the aisles of a K-Mart in tears because she had become separated from her mother, who was looting the place; The elderly woman who approached my microwave van outside a super marked that was being looted because she was hungry and didn't have any food in her house. The LA riots changed my life. I started my own company, left the news business and have been shooting and directing in entertainment for almost 20 years now. I don't miss working in news.

I was a 911 Operator for LAPD, I heard the verdict as I was getting ready to go to work. I packed a change of clothing, as I figured I might not be able to get home for a day or two if things went sideways. As I entered the Communications Center, I could tell it was getting ugly. I took so many calls where people were just cursing and saying the most vile things to me, or they were watching Reginald Denny being beaten on live TV and calling 911 to scream at us for not helping him. I don't think citizens understand how relatively few officers are available at any given time -- no match for a growing crowd intent on mayhem. The calls came in so fast, the 911 system couldn't keep up, so we got calls without knowing the address they were coming from. My kids were at home, watching TV when the show was interrupted with an alert that there was fire at Parker Center, where they knew I was -- they were terrified that I would be hurt.

We worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off, all days off canceled for the next couple of weeks. We were exhausted, working at a fever pitch because the violence just never stopped. I saw an ugliness in humanity that I never knew existed -- part of it was people engaging in violence as a protest to other violence, but there were a whole lot of opportunists with U-Haul trailers heading into the city to do some free "shopping." I'd have to say my opinion of humanity was irreversibly altered during those days.

We missed the airing of the verdict that afternoon, because my dad was taking me to Pasadena Civic Center for a college fair. Afterwards, in high spirits, we decided to grab a late dinner, but all the restaurants were closed. It was unusual because it wasn't that late.

We drove back home on the 110 freeway back to South L.A. and marveled at a palm tree burning. Then we saw another palm tree burning, and then we saw smoke rising throughout the city skyline. We quickly realized what was happening, and we needed to get home.

We saw the looting of the stores along King Blvd., and the countless times we had to cede the way due to the fast cars ripping through red lights. What got to me the most was someone decided to burn a van in front of the police station, and they were outside just staring at it, almost helpless.

I remember wanting to move out of this forsaken city that night, and eventually I did for some time.

Schools were opened and teachers were told to come in to work. I was able to navigate from the Westside to downtown via Olympic. But it was too dangerous to go through Koreatown by the afternoon. I went north and then west along Sunset. By the time I reached Olympic near La Cienega, it was so jammed and so scary that I drove on the sidewalk along with other cars. I don't know if people realize how far west the rioting came. There was damage on the outskirts of Beverlywood and Beverly Hills.

I remember seeing the gloomy sky from the first east side. I was 9 years old, living in East Los Angeles and I remember watching violent images on the news. I remember witnessing a man being pulled out of his trailer truck and being beaten. I prayed the looting and fired did not reach my side of town.

I was a teacher at Jefferson High School in the middle of all of the South Central activities, watching tv the night before, called other teachers and students to hear what they were thinking. We weren't allowed back the next day, but when we were allowed, all the teachers were there and very concerned about our students and their families. We heard lots of stories, mainly how frightened and sad the students were about the destruction of their neighborhood. When areas were rebuilt it all looked a little better than before.

I was working at USC at the time. The day after the verdicts, I had the day off as the school was closed. I lived in an apartment across from the old Ambassador Hotel, and went out to the street on Wilshire to get breakfast to go. When I hit the street at about 10 am, the entire area was deserted; but Jack in the Box was still open. I took my breakfast upstairs and began to watch the riot coverage. Soon on the screen appeared a huge structure fire; an apartment complex was on fire. Framed two by fours stood in the middle of a five story structure on each side of the construction area; the framing was as if it was kindling igniting the two structures. It was a huge inferno. The announcer stated the fire was at 6th and Normandie . I thought to myself, "If I look out my window..." I turned and saw one of the largest fires that I've ever seen in my life. I knew it was time to leave.

I did not have a car. I called my friend, a Japanease American who works for the Times to come and pick me up. As I went to the street, Wilshire was in chaos. Across the street were the corporate headquarters for Thrifty and Big Five, with their flagship stores underneath. People were piling out of them with liquor and ammo; or at least in my frightned state I assumed that. In my apartment complex lived many elderley people. People were passing in front of the complex with stolen loot; the elderley people were screaming at them, asking them if they knnew what they were doing.

My friend pulled up with his car and I got in. We decided to go back to his place in the hills of Silverlake. I felt we had bullseyes on the back of our heads as we drove through the anarchy; one Asian, one white.

When we got to his house, people were standing in the street with dazed looks. These were people who owned expensive houses, and the fear was palpable in their expressions, as the looting and fires were moving into Hollywood. I felt like I was in a bad science fiction movie; but this was real.

I decided to spend the night with my old roomates in the hills above Cal State LA, where I went to college. I don't know why, but I had a sense that my old neighborhood would be safe. Many people owned their houses for generations in that part of East LA. The hunch proved right; we heard many sirens that night, but the neighborhood was left untouched.

I did not return to my apartment untill there were National Guard units patrolling in the Wilshire. I took the bus to work down Vermont that next Monday. The devastation took my breath away; many of the stores were just rubble. When I got to work at USC, the atmosphere in the building where I worked was of sadness and confusion. Talking to a dean of the school that I worked in, I mentioned that the camera store (owned by an Asian) in which we had our film developed for the school had been looted and burned to the ground. He stated that, "Well, their prices were too high anyway." I thought to myself "This is the whole problem in this city." I cursed at him and left the room.

I decided that I would give it two weeks; if I felt the same way about the hopless situation in the city that I had grown up in, I was leaving. After two weeks, the feeling was the same, that the problems were not going to change. I gave my two weeks notice to the insensitve (racist?) dean and moved to Arizona.

While in Arizona, I obtained my teaching certifiacte. I now teach theater in Klamath Falls Oregon. It is a beautiful place. Every day however, it comes to my mind that if the riots would not have happened, I would not have the rewarding life that surronds me. I have met and married the woman of my dreams. I have the opportunity to change young peoples lives.

But a bad taste folows me also, and browsing the Times on-line and seeing your 20 year remembarance brings up old wounds. I feel that in many ways I deserted a city that was my home; that I deserted the elderley people of my apartment building that had no way out of the terror; that I deserted my friends and family. A month or so before the riots, I was riding the bus to work when a young man, 13-16 years old, tagged the windows as we were stopped at a streetlight in the middle of the day. I was shocked and dismayed. What motivates someone to do something like that? I decided to become a big brother with that national organization. I had one more orientation to go through before I was to be assigned to some young boy who was in desperate need of mentoring. Then my city exploded.

I feel like a traitor to the little brother that I never met.

My Family and I were watching the brutal beating of Reginald Denny and the fires starting on live on TV . Within a hour my phone was ringing to report to work and man a Reserve LA County Fire Engine in East LA. The on-shift crew was already moved into the riot area when we got there. Immediately we were dispatched to a structure fire in the south central area.

Five hours later I was able to call home to tell my family i was ok from a phone booth at a Liquor Store, which was burning next to me, staying close to the crew at all times.

We would be giving assignments for fires while coming across new ones, so we passed the lost ones and we picked what we could saved. We were busting our asses to stop one fire while another was being started across the street.

I was a senior History major at USC preparing for final exams. In addition, I was a member of the Track team preparing for my final race as a Trojan vs. UCLA. I watched the verdicts as I prepared to turn in a take-home final. I had no idea I was about to witness history first hand.

As a student of history, and someone who grew up in Simi Valley, I followed the trial of the LAPD officers very closely. Due to my awareness of some of the intracacies of the trial, I was probably one of very few people in Los Angeles that expected the (the jury dead-locked on at least one count if my memory serves me correctly) not guilty verdicts.

After the verdicts were announced, I ventured across the street to campus to turn in my exam. I left the Law School where my professor's office was located, then proceeded to Heritage Hall to change for my workout.

Naively, I did not expect the unrest that was to follow. For the next hour, I ran alone (a young, white male - FROM Simi Valley, no less) in Exposition Park. During the run, I noticed the park was eerily deserted. I then noticed an unusual amount of Police activity. None of this caused me to cut my run short. It was not until I returned to Heritage Hall, and some coaches were watching TV did I realize what was happening.

I spent the next 24 hours both saddened, yet enthralled by what was taking place in my midst. It was a surreal experience. I can still remember vividly the many events and emotions that took place during those 36 hours before the National Guard arrived.

My husband and I were both born in Los Angeles, but have our home in in Costa Mesa, where I still live. In 1992 we could see the glow from the fires in LA at night, it seemed like the whole city must have been burning.

I wanted to take the food to a church we'd heard about that was accepting donations. We bought a bunch of groceries and our family took a trip to L.A. On our way, we saw block after block of liquor stores and old dilapidated buildings and unkempt business areas. Behind those businesses on the main street there were nice neat neighborhoods of older homes. I remember commenting to my husband the city had allowed all those liquor stores and apparently did little to make sure business and retail areas were maintained. You could see the pride in the neighborhood, but not on the main street. I didn't see a large grocery store anywhere. It was just a depressing scene, and we weren't even at the burned out areas yet.

We happened to drive by a church where people were gathered, and dropped off the groceries, the person who accepted them seemed very grateful. It was one of those situations where I felt like we had to help, to do something. There were a lot of ugly truths revealed in those days before and after the riots about racism.

At the time I was just 12 years old. We lived in South Central, on Broadway and Gage. As soon as the news started reporting on the first rioting, I grabbed my diary and started writing what I heard on the news and later over the radio.

I remember seeing the first of the fires from my bedroom window. That very first day, my mom made me move downstairs and sleep on the floor of her bedroom, she was afraid a stray bullet would fly through my bedroom window. Our power went out that day as well. My stepfather managed to get to the Ralph's and bought groceries while most everyone was looting the market. He brought back batteries for my Walkman and that's how we listened to the news.

During the day we could see and hear the looters take over the 99 cent store on the corner. My stepfather had his rifle ready by the door, not the smartest idea, but we felt safe. Our neighbor down the street had a generator, and at night I would hear the humming noise it made.

By the third day, most of our food had spoiled. I heard on the radio that the National Guard was moving in. I went upstairs and saw their tanks coming down the 110 Harbor freeway. We needed food and so we drove around for about 2 hours, looking at all the destruction. The National Guard had set up their command center at a looted shopping center and I remember seeing them on the roof. We finally found a place that was open for business and we were able to buy our dinner at KFC.

Most of Broadway was completely destroyed. We drove around and couldn't believe what we saw. The storefronts said "Black owned" but the looters had no mercy on them either. When we got our power back on we were finally able to see what had happened to our city. Only then did the reality of the riots set in.

During the whole ordeal, as I wrote in my diary, in the dark, with only an oil lamp, or by day, not too close to the windows, I felt I needed to document what was going on; I even named my diary Kitty, just like Anne Frank.

I still love my city, with all it's troubles and glories. With its gritty sidewalks next to the luxury hotels. I love the people you barely notice as you rush past. I now live about an hour away, but I go back every chance I get.

I was in Melbourne, Australia when the riots happened. Talk about being on the other side of the world while Los Angeles was burning and being destroyed. I was working on the road for Neil Diamond and we were in the middle of a week run of shows in Melbourne.

Our hotel had three TV channels. All local. No CNN.

The only news we could get was on the local 5 o'clock news and by calls back to the LA office and family. Nobody at that time had cell phones either.

It just freaked everybody out. Not only watching the city burn, but also by a lack of information. We flew back to Sydney three days later and checked in to a hotel that had CNN. Nobody left their room for two days.

I was a freshman in H.S. living in the upper class suburbs when my father, my older brother, and I went out to help our cousins protect their stores in South L.A. I remember we had two pistols with us for protection. Some of our cousins' stores were completely burned down and others only had the windows smashed. I remember one uncle looking at his decimated store and just laughing. I guess that was the only way he knew how to react to the chaos around him. For three days I didn't see any police, just firefighters doing their best. It was an absolutely surreal experience I vividly remember to this day. Even in retrospect, I can't help but think that this was a massive failure by law enforcement and local govts to protect & serve. Everyone on the streets were armed with guns or knives. It was absolute chaos.

I remember being in the 8th Grade at a Catholic School in Lynwood. The teachers and staff hurried us away once notice of the verdict and of the violence started coming in. In the background you could hear the sound of gunfire and sirens, and the sight of plumes of smoke dotting the horizon. I lived a good 20 minute walk home, but thankfully a friend gave me a ride to their place until my parents could pick me up.

A shopping center went up in flames, sadly a pet shop was a casualty and not all the animals were evacuated. The Marines were posted in my neighborhood until the situation stabilized. I still remember the anxiety and the charged atmosphere of those days. I wondered how Los Angeles was going to come out this bad situation, and then I discovered as a student that not much had changed from the Watts Riots of 1965.

I was at a business meeting at a hotel on 7th Street near downtown that evening. At about 8:30PM we heard that things were starting to go bad on Vermont Avenue. We quickly wrapped up that meeting, and being the logistics person in the group, I gave everyone instructions on how to go east into downtown, where it was still safe, in order to get on the various freeways as quickly as possible. Everyone got home safely but most of us didn't get very far from a radio or TV for days (it's worth noting this was before everyone had a cell phone and access to the Internet). A few years later I remember a friend who described the four seasons in Los Angeles as Earthquake, Flood, Fire and Riot. The first few years of the '90s were a time to decide your level of commitment to the City and to the region.

I was 12 years old and I lived on 49th street and Compton Ave. Several people from the neighborhood looted and burned down Dave's Corner Market and Liquor store. A few weeks later after everything calmed down my mom eventually let us kids out of the house. I remember several families from 49th street went and swept up and cleaned the store’s parking lot as best we could. it was a crazy time in the area and tensions were high. I can’t believe it has been 20 yrs.