Rodney G King

Rodney King did "not want to see the pain and the destruction after the verdict that took place last May and April." --Attorney Milton Grimes, when asked what his client had said before Saturday's verdicts in the federal trial were announced. Rodney G. King, the central figure in the trials of the four LAPD officers charged with beating him, has kept a low profile since Saturday's verdicts.

In 1992, Ron Paul, now a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, published a newsletter called the "Ron Paul Political Report. " That year, the report published a special edition on "racial terrorism," a favorite theme. It included an observation about the Los Angeles riots, which erupted after a Ventura County jury acquitted four police officers charged with beating Rodney G. King. "Order was only restored in L.A.," the publication opined, "when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.

The evening after former Los Angeles Police Officer Laurence M. Powell--convicted in the videotaped beating of Rodney G. King--is to be released from a halfway house, he will be honored at a "homecoming welcome" fund-raiser hosted by an array of conservative politicians. The dinner, scheduled for Dec.

Warren Christopher, the former secretary of State and eminence grise of the Democratic Party whose achievements in a wide-ranging public career include brokering the Bosnian peace agreement for the Clinton administration and leading an independent investigation of the Los Angeles Police Department that brought important reforms after a notorious police beating, has died. He was 85. Christopher died Friday at his home in Los Angeles of complications from bladder and kidney cancer, said Kathy Osborne, his executive assistant at the law firm O'Melveny & Myers, where Christopher was a senior partner.

A former police officer tearfully testified Tuesday that he tried to stop the beating of Rodney G. King and implored fellow officers in the courtroom: "Is it only me that's admitted something wrong happened out there?" Theodore J. Briseno, who broke ranks with his Los Angeles Police Department colleagues early on and called the beating unjustified, choked with emotion as he blurted out his feelings about being considered a pariah by some police officers.

They are immigrants from different parts of the globe. They did not know one another before the incident. They have not met since. A Korean and an Israeli, two people who just happened to be together at the precise moment when American rage, home-grown and blind to anything but skin color, exploded the afternoon of April 29. Sammy Botach said he went back last week looking for Joung Hi Kwon.

The black community in Orange County should get more involved in sparking change and pushing for social, economic and religious equality following the verdicts of four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating Rodney King, a panel of African-American leaders said Saturday. "The verdicts are over and the decision has been made," said Pastor Isaac L. Patrick, who organized the forum at the Gospel Light Church of God in Christ in Santa Ana. "My concern is: Where do we go from here?"

The Los Angeles City Council agreed Wednesday to hire an outside attorney to represent the city in a claim filed by a police officer who witnessed the Rodney G. King beating. Los Angeles Police Officer Paul Gebhart, who is listed as a defendant in King's civil lawsuit against the city, filed a workers' compensation claim, allegedly for stress. He has been off duty since January.

A beating by police stirs a furor: Just after midnight on March 3, a man with a home video camera captured the Rodney G. King beating on videotape, above, unleashing charges of rampant police brutality and demands that the LAPD be investigated. The incident involving King, shown at right upon his release from County Jail three days later, precipitated the formation of the Christopher Commission.

Stacey C. Koon, one of two police officers convicted in the Rodney G. King beating in Los Angeles, has been moved from California to a federal prison in Sheridan, Ore. Koon was moved from a federal prison camp in Dublin, Calif., because it is changing to a women's facility. Koon, 44, is serving a 30-month sentence for violating King's civil rights. He is scheduled for release Dec. 14.

Ester Soriano, 61, a Filipino American civil rights activist who was the jury forewoman in the civil damages trial of Rodney G. King, died April 3 at a Los Angeles hospital of complications from liver cancer surgery, said her sister, Emily Deitrich. King, who was black, was beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1991, an incident that would help spark riots the next year after the officers were acquitted. He brought a civil action against the city. Soriano facilitated a discussion between jurors who were split on whether King should get significant punitive damages.

Rodney G. King was sentenced Friday to one year in a drug treatment center after pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges in three cases, prosecutors said. King, whose 1991 beating by Los Angeles police officers captured international attention, entered the pleas in Pomona Superior Court to three counts of being under the influence of PCP and one count of indecent exposure. Judge Thomas Peterson sentenced King, 36, to one year at the American Recovery Center in Pomona.

Rodney G. King, whose beating by police officers led to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, was charged Thursday with being under the influence of the drug PCP. The misdemeanor charge was filed by the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. King, 36, was arrested Tuesday in nearby Claremont after a motel clerk called police to say that a man appeared to be intoxicated or on drugs. The Altadena resident was freed on his own recognizance and ordered to appear for a hearing on Oct.

Nearly a decade after he was brutally beaten by Los Angeles police, Rodney G. King says he is still taking a beating--from his lawyers. He says they have made more money on his case than he has and, by his reckoning, have cheated him out of more than $1 million. "I feel like this," King testified last year in a deposition in a civil lawsuit against some of them. "I feel like first I took an awful beating from the police, and now my own lawyers are beating up on me."

Rodney G. King is serving a 90-day jail term for a hit-and-run incident involving his estranged wife, authorities said Thursday. King, who has had several run-ins with authorities since his infamous 1991 videotaped beating by Los Angeles police, lost an appeal of his 1996 conviction for the Alhambra incident. King reported to the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail on Aug. 4 and is serving his sentence separated from the general population "due to his notoriety or celebrity . . .

Rodney G. King, whose videotaped beating and the resulting criminal trial led to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, pleaded no contest Friday to violating probation and was sentenced to work 30 days on a Caltrans road crew. The Caltrans sentence is an option defendants are given in lieu of jail time, said Deputy City Atty. Rosalind Russell. The Caltrans sentence allows King to work an eight-hour day and return home, Russell said.

Regarding "The Wasteland," Cathy Curtis' profile of photographer Lewis Baltz (March 29): It's worthy of note--I can't believe that Baltz is not aware of it--that his "11777 Foothill Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif.," rather than depicting a "generic," "unextraordinary" location, is really a photograph of the exact site in Lake View Terrace of the Rodney G. King beating. And as such, it is the focal point for a politically volatile firestorm that received worldwide media attention for what happened there also in 1991.

Rodney G. King has sued his former attorney for malpractice, contending that lawyer Steven Lerman misappropriated money won in a civil suit against the city of Los Angeles stemming from King's 1991 beating by police. In the suit, filed in Superior Court on Friday, King alleges that Lerman has failed to comply with repeated requests to fully account for money awarded to King. In April 1994, a jury awarded King $3.

Trial proceedings began Tuesday at Alhambra Municipal Court in a spousal abuse case involving Rodney G. King and his estranged wife, Crystal, that stems from an alleged hit-and-run incident last year in Alhambra. King has found strange celebrity since the 1991 videotaped beating that led to state and federal trials, prison sentences for two police officers who were tried, and a $3.8-million civil judgment in his favor. And his fame became an issue at nearly every turn of the current case.