Rodney King , the motorist who was videotaped two decades ago by a bystander as Los Angeles police officers severely beat him during an arrest, is dead.
He was found by his fiancee, Cynthia Kelly, at the bottom of a pool in Rialto, California, at about 5:25 a.m. PST, said Capt. Randy DeAnda.
Police attempted CPR, but he was pronounced dead at a local hospital shortly after 6 a.m. PST, added Capt. DeAnda.
There were no obvious signs of foul play. The police are conducting a drowning investigation.
Kelly told friends that in the hours leading up to her fiancee’s drowning, King had been drinking and smoking pot, says TMZ.
In March 1991, King was infamously kicked and hit 56 times with police batons and tasered. Footage of the beating (video below) and the later acquittal of the officers involved led to the Los Angeles riots.
Officers arrived to find King unresponsive in the water, Hardin said. He was transported to Arrowhead Regional Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:11 a.m.
There were no signs of foul play, Hardin said. The San Bernardino County coroner will perform an autopsy within 48 hours.
The 1992 riots, which were set off by the acquittals of the officers who beat King, lasted three days and left 55 people dead, more than 2,000 injured and swaths of Los Angeles on fire. At the height of the violence, King pleaded on television: "Can we all get along?"
King was stopped for speeding on a darkened street on March 3, 1991. Four Los Angeles police officers hit him more than 50 times with their batons, kicked him and shot him with stun guns.
A man who had quietly stepped outside his home to observe the commotion videotaped most of it and turned a copy over to a TV station. It was played over and over for the following year, inflaming racial tensions across the country.
It seemed that the videotape would be the key evidence to a guilty verdict against the officers, whose trial was moved to the predominantly white suburb of Simi Valley, Calif. Instead, on April 29, 1992, a jury with no black members acquitted three of the officers; a mistrial was declared for a fourth.
Violence erupted immediately, starting in South Los Angeles.
Police, seemingly caught off-guard, were quickly outnumbered by rioters and retreated. As the uprising spread to the city's Koreatown area, shop owners armed themselves and engaged in running gun battles with looters.
During the riots, a white truck driver named Reginald Denny was pulled by several black men from his cab and beaten almost to death. He required surgery to repair his shattered skull, reset his jaw and put one eye back into its socket.
The police chief, Daryl Gates, came under intense criticism from city officials who said officers were slow to respond to the riots. He was forced to retire. Gates died of cancer in 2010.
In the two decades after he became the central figure in the riots, King was arrested several times, mostly for alcohol-related crimes. He later became a record company executive and a reality TV star, appearing on shows such as "Celebrity Rehab."
In an interview earlier this year with The Associated Press, King said he was a happy man.
"America's been good to me after I paid the price and stayed alive through it all," he said.
King, who struggled with alcoholism, appeared in later years both on “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” and “Sober House.”
King was 47.
Police state there were no preliminary signs of foul play and no obvious injuries to King's body. A drowning investigation is currently underway and it is being said that King's body will be autopsied.
King, whose beating by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department sparked tons of controversy, put him on the map back in 1991. His beating came after a high-speed chase and was then caught on camera which sparked huge changes in the war on race in America.
King was 25 years-old and on parole after a robbery conviction in April of 1991. A 2011 interview had King admit he had been drinking and was heading home from a friend's house when he realized a police car following him. He got nervous and thought about going back to prison so he decided to run.
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