newjerseynewsroom.com

BY BOB HOLT

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM 

Rodney King, who became a symbol for civil rights and police brutality in 1991, was found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool in Rialto, California on Sunday.

King had been 25 years old and on parole from a robbery conviction when was stopped by police for speeding on March 3, 1991. According to the Detroit Free Press, four Los Angeles police officers hit him more than 50 times with batons, kicked him and shot him with stun guns.

King suffered a broken eye socket, numerous skull fractures, and facial nerve damage in the beating. Meanwhile, a man videotaped most of the incident and gave a copy to a TV station.

A three-month trial took place in predominantly white Simi Valley, and three of the officers were acquitted of all charges. There were no black members on the jury. A year later, two of the officers were found guilty of civil rights charges.

As a result of the 1991 verdict, Los Angeles faced a series of fiery riots over three days, killed 55 people and injured more than 2,000. During the third day of riots, King said: "People, I just want to say, can we all get along? Can we get along?"

Georgetown professor Michael Eric Tyson ranked King's question with the more well-known black expressions of the past century. "It was a critical question at a moment of crisis that forged our human bonds with one another," Dyson said, according to the Huffington Post. "It grew up out of the hope and the desire, especially of people of color, to see this nation come together."

King did fight alcoholism and substance abuse over the years. He said, according to The Daily Beast, “I tell people I’m not perfect and I haven’t always made good decisions, and sometimes I make the same mistakes again and again. I’m not proud of the trouble I’ve been in, but I’m thankful to be alive. So many of my partners didn’t make it and sometimes I wonder how I did.”

King had recently said he would go through it all again. "Yes, I would go through that night. I said once that I wouldn't, but that's not true,” King said to the Los Angeles Times. "It made the world a better place."

According to CNN, King said he has forgiven the officers involved in his beating. "Yes, I've forgiven them, because I've been forgiven many times," he said last year, 20 years after the beating. "I have to be able to forgive -- for the future, for the younger generation coming behind me, so... they can understand it and if a situation like that happened again, they could deal with it a lot easier."

After officers and paramedics attempted CPR at the pool, King was taken to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, and pronounced dead at 6:11 a.m. Sunday morning. There will be an autopsy to determine the cause of his death.