Attack on Reginald Denny

On March 3, 1991, an amateur video recording showed motorist Rodney King being badly beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers during an arrest. The outrage resulting from the acquittal of these police officers was the principal cause of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Denny was a 36-year-old construction dump truck driver attacked on the first day of the rioting. In what has been called an "iconic image" of the L.A. uprising, video footage from a news helicopter showed Denny being pulled from his truck and beaten with fists, kicked, and struck with a cinder block.[1]

The attack has been described as a hate crime[2] in which Denny was targeted for his race in response to police brutality against King and the belief that the criminal justice system had failed to protect King’s civil rights.[3]

On April 29, 1992, at 5:39 pm, Denny loaded his red dump truck with 27 short tons (24 t) of sand and began driving to a plant in Inglewood, where the sand was due. He left the Santa Monica Freeway and took a familiar shortcut across Florence Avenue to get to his destination. His truck had no radio, so he did not realize that he was driving into a riot. At 6:46 pm, after entering the intersection at Normandie, rioters threw rocks at his windows, and he heard people shouting for him to stop, forcing him to do so in the middle of the street.

Antoine Miller climbed up and opened the truck door, giving an unidentified man the chance to pull Denny out and throw him on the ground. Henry Watson stood on Denny's neck to hold him down as a group of men surrounded him and Anthony Brown kicked him in the abdomen. Miller searched Denny's back pockets before climbing into the truck and running off with a stolen bag. As Watson walked away, two other unidentified men joined in the attack: one hurled a five-pound oxygenator stolen from Larry Tarvin's truck at Denny's head,[4] and the other kicked him and hit him with a claw hammer.[5] News footage showed Damian Williams throwing a cinder block at Denny's head, then doing a football-style victory dance in the road.[6] Robert Tur and Marika Gerrard, who were televising the events live from a helicopter, reported that there was no police presence in the area.[1]

Four residents of South Central Los Angeles, Bobby Green Jr., Lei Yuille, Titus Murphy, and Terri Barnett, who had been watching the events on television, came to Denny's aid.[7][8] All four who helped rescue Denny were African Americans.[9] Green, also a truck driver,[10] boarded Denny's truck and took over at the wheel and drove him to the Daniel Freeman Hospital in Inglewood. Those who helped Denny were recognized by the City of Los Angeles, TRW trucking, and Washington Mutual Bank.

Paramedics who attended to Denny said he suffered major trauma and came very close to dying. Soon after Green took Denny to the hospital, he suffered a seizure. His skull was fractured in 91 places and pushed into his brain.[11] His left eye was so badly dislocated that it would have fallen into his sinus cavity had the surgeons not replaced the crushed bone with a piece of plastic.[12] A permanent crater remains in his forehead despite efforts to correct it.

The "L.A. Four" was a nickname given to the first four men charged with the attack on Denny: Damian Williams, Henry Watson, Antoine Miller, and Gary Williams.[13]

On May 12, outgoing Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates started a search for three of Denny's attackers, who were identified from the video of the beating. Gates himself arrested Damian Williams, while other officers arrested Henry Watson and Antoine Miller. Soon afterward, Gary Williams gave himself up to the police. The three arrested men were suspected to be part of the 83 Gangster Crips.

Judge John W. Ouderkirk granted Miller a separate trial on the grounds that the strong evidence against Watson and Damian Williams could harm his case; Miller was sentenced to 17 months in jail and 27 months on probation. Gary Williams was sentenced to three years in jail for attempting to rob Denny and assaulting another man.

Edi M.O. Faal was Damian Williams' defense attorney, and Earl C. Broadly was Henry Watson's. On July 28, 1993, Watson's and Williams' trial began. The two were charged with the assault of Denny as well as five other motorists and two firefighters who were driving past the intersection of Florence and Normandie shortly after the start of the Los Angeles riots on April 29. At the trial, Denny faced his attackers for the first time since they had assaulted him. On August 12, 1993, a jury of five whites, three blacks, three Latinos, and one Asian was chosen. As in the Rodney King police trial, the prosecution relied heavily on video shot by a third party, this time in a helicopter. They also planned to build up portraits of Watson and Williams as criminals, antisocial, and beyond likelihood of rehabilitation and redemption.

On August 19, Deputy District Attorney Lawrence Morrison delivered the opening statement and a week later, the videotape of the beating was shown. The doctors who treated Denny testified, describing his wounds and their efforts to repair them. Next to testify were witnesses of the beating and Denny's rescuers. The prosecution rested on September 17, 1993. The defense began pleading on September 20, making a case for unpremeditated assault, with Faal challenging the video evidence and portraying Williams as a victim of poverty and racism. In the closing arguments, the defense attorneys claimed that Williams and Watson were being used as scapegoats for the L.A. riots. The prosecution counter-argued that the two had knowingly tried to kill Denny and were not victims.

Williams' lawyers successfully argued that he had not intended to kill Denny;[14] he was found not guilty of attempted murder, assault, and aggravated mayhem, and convicted of four misdemeanors and simple mayhem, while Watson was convicted of a single misdemeanor assault charge.[6] During a break in the trial, Denny approached Williams' mother, Georgiana, and hugged her.[7] Watson was given credit for time served and was sentenced to three years' probation for the assaults of Denny and truck driver Larry Tarvin. Williams was denied bail and sentenced to a maximum of ten years for the assaults of Denny and four other people on December 7, 1993.

Denny sought to soothe the racial tensions of the uprising in which he was attacked, reminding reporters that most of his rescuers were African Americans, as were the doctors who treated him.[7] He sought to make peace with his attackers' families,[8] saying that Watson had "been through quite enough" having been jailed for 17 months awaiting trial.[7] Watson later apologized to Denny during an appearance on the Phil Donahue Show,[17] where the pair shook hands.[7][17]

As a result of the injuries he suffered during the attacks, Denny had to undergo years of rehabilitative therapy, and his speech and ability to walk were also damaged.[7][8] During his recovery, he received over 27,000 get-well cards from supportive members of the community.[18] After unsuccessfully suing the city of Los Angeles, Denny moved to Arizona, near Lake Havasu, to work as an independent boat motor mechanic. Denny has largely avoided the media and rarely spoken publicly about his ordeal.[7][8]

In 1997, Damian Williams was released from prison early for good behavior, but in 2003, he was sentenced to 46 years to life in prison for the 2000 murder of drug dealer Grover Tinner.[19] As of 2017, he is incarcerated at Centinela State Prison.[20] Watson was re-arrested and sentenced to three years for a narcotics conviction, and after his release, owned and operated a limousine service in Los Angeles.[17] On February 1, 2004, Antoine Miller was shot outside of a Hollywood nightclub during an altercation and died in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on February 8 at the age of 31.[21] Gary Williams, Henry Watson, and Damian Williams gave interviews about the riots for the 2017 documentary Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982–1992.[22]

The best available footage of Denny's beating on April 29, 1992, was filmed by Marika Tur from a helicopter piloted by her then-spouse, reporter Robert Tur. Together, they operated a company called Los Angeles News Service (LANS). In the rush to cover the riots as they developed, dozens of television networks and stations around the world simply copied and aired the LANS footage without permission.

LANS sued nearly all of them in federal court for copyright infringement; at least one of these lawsuits was successful.[23] The last case was finally settled in 2004. Only a handful of stations, mostly in California, already had preexisting agreements with LANS or waited to negotiate agreements before airing the footage, and thus were not sued.

In July 2006, LANS sued the site YouTube in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, for copyright infringement. LANS alleged in the lawsuit that, in the space of one week, a version of the video uploaded by a YouTube user was viewed over 1,000 times via the site. They argued this hurt their ability to license the video. YouTube requested summary judgment based on DMCA safe harbor, which was denied. LANS voluntarily dismissed the case without prejudice, planning to join a class action against YouTube in New York. YouTube appealed both the dismissal and the summary judgment ruling. However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed the appeal.[24]