By Easton L
Rodney King dead at 47
Rodney King found dead in swimming pool
It was the deadliest race riots in U.S. history, the black motorist’s name Rodney King, whose videotaped beating by Los Angeles police led to the 1992 riots that ravaged the city, is dead at 47.
He was found dead at his home on Sunday, police said.
Police in Rialto, Calif., found King’s body in a swimming pool after getting a 911
call from his fiancee, Rialto Police Capt. Randy Deanda told NBC News. Officers pulled King from the pool and began doing CPR but he was unresponsive.
King was transported to Arrowhead Hospital in Colton, where he was pronounced dead at 6:11 a.m. PDT, Deanda said.
King’s representative Suzanne Wickman confirmed to his death to KABC-TV. According to TMZ, King’s fiancée, Cynthia Kelley, told friends King spent the bulk of Saturday drinking and “smoked marijuana at some point,” before she went to bed at 2:00 a.m.
The cause of death is unknown, but police are investigating it as a drowning. Rialto Police Capt. Randy DeAnda told CNN there were no preliminary signs of foul play.
King was beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers on a dark street on March 3, 1991, after he was stopped for speeding. Four officers hit him more than 50 times, kicked him and shot him with stun guns. A bystander videotaped much of the incident from a distance.
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A year later, a California jury acquitted the four officers, three of whom were white and one Hispanic.
The riots that erupted on April 29, 1992, were among the most lethal in U.S. history. By the time order was restored, more than 50 people had died, nearly 3,000 were injured and thousands of businesses were damaged or destroyed.
In one of the most searing images from the riots, a 33-year-old white construction worker named Reginald Denny was pulled from his vehicle and beaten unconscious by four men at a Los Angeles intersection. Twenty years later, he has still not recovered from his injuries.
