Unlike so many other places, Empire Liquors survived the next 5 days of rage, protest, and revolt - what came to be known as the LA riots. "I remember her going to the motel to get buckets of water to put it out," Harlins says.
Shinese Harlins says her mother put out a fire that someone started at Empire Liquors, the store owned by Soon Ja Du and her family. "That's when I realized it was bigger than what I can imagine," she says. She was walking to the liquor store with her sister and when they got there, it was on fire. "We had just moved to the heart of South Central LA on 55th and Western," she says. On April 22, 1992, an appeals court upheld that ruling.Įxactly one week later the verdict came back for the four officers in Rodney King's case: Not Guilty.įirefighters extinguish a fire during the rioting in Los Angeles, on April 30, 1992. In November 1991, Soon Ja Du was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but the judge in the case gave her no jail time. "These cases really play out in the public in tandem with one another," says Brenda Stevenson, a UCLA professor who wrote a book about the Latasha Harlins' case, "almost as if they were parallel." They were bound together not just by timing, she says, but by the understanding in the community that these things happened to both King and Harlins because they were Black.īut, Stevenson says, it was the verdicts in both cases that propelled the community forward, towards an explosive rebellion. "She wanted to make sure her sister and brother were cool, that they had they head on strong," says Shinese Harlins. After Latasha Harlins' mother died, her grandmother took her and her younger siblings in, and Latasha helped raise them too. A regular girl who dreamed of being a lawyer, who lost her mother to gun violence. "She was just a regular teenage girl," Harlins says. Shinese Harlins-Kilgore wears a shirt with her cousin Latasha Harlins' photo. "His smile was electric to me," she says. When she thinks of her father now, she doesn't think of that video. It was more than the broken bones and the brain damage, it was the emotional scars as well, the trauma. Rodney King survived that beating, but his daughter says he carried its scars until he died in 2012. When she saw him afterwards, she didn't recognize his face. Lora King thought she was watching her father die. As she looked around at the faces of her family, she realized it was her dad.
Lora King was 7 years old when she saw the black and white video on television news, grainy footage of four police officers savagely beating a Black man.įirst, she thought how odd it was, that this man on the TV shared her father's name.
Latasha, 15, was fatally shot in a liquor store. Shinese Harlins-Kilgore, cousin of Latasha Harlins and CEO of the Latasha Harlins Foundation, receives a hug from Lora King, daughter of Rodney King and CEO of the Rodney King Foundation, during the 30th anniversary of the Rodney King Civil Unrest HOPE Community Bus Tour Press conference in Los Angeles.