Attack on Reginald Denny

Reginald Oliver Denny (born 1953) is a former construction truck driver who was pulled from his truck and severely beaten during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

His attackers, a group of black men who came to be known as the "L.A. Four", targeted Denny because he was white.

The attack was captured on video by a news helicopter and broadcast live on U.S. national television.

Four other black L.A. residents who had witnessed the attack on live television came to Denny's aid, placing him back in his truck and driving him to the hospital.

Denny suffered a fractured skull and impairment of his speech and his ability to walk, for which he underwent years of rehabilitative therapy.

After unsuccessfully suing the City of Los Angeles, Denny moved to Arizona, where he worked as an independent boat mechanic and has mostly avoided media contact.

Born in 1953 in Lansing, Michigan, Reginald Oliver Denny was a 39-year-old truck driver at the time of the attack.

His parents moved to Sylmar, Los Angeles, when he was a child.

Damian Monroe Williams (born March 17, 1973) was considered the most high-profile member of the four.

Nicknamed "Football", he was an 18-year-old former high-school football star.

Williams was identified on the video recording thanks to a large tattoo on his left arm related to the Crips street gang.

He was mentioned in news reports and court records as a member of the 71 Hustlers, an affiliation of the Eight Trey Gangster Crips.

Williams had several juvenile arrests but no convictions.

His friends recalled him as being generous to children and devoted to caring for an older brother who had been beaten in a robbery.

Williams faced the most serious charges of the four, including attempted murder, assault, and aggravated mayhem.

His jury acquitted him on those charges and instead convicted him of only four misdemeanors and simple mayhem.

He was given the maximum sentence of 10 years, but was paroled after serving four years.

On March3, 1991, an amateur video recording showed Rodney King, a black motorist, 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.

On April29, 1992, at 5:39p.m., Denny loaded his red dump truck with 27 ST of sand to be delivered to a plant in Inglewood.

On the way, he left the Harbor Freeway and took a familiar shortcut along Florence Avenue.

He was listening to the radio, "probably KKLA, a Christian channel," Denny said, "or country station KZLA."

At 6:46p.m., after he entered the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenue, 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.

In what has been called an "iconic image" of the L.A. riots, video footage from the Los Angeles News Service helicopter showed Denny being pulled from his truck and beaten with fists, kicked, and struck with a Cinder Block during the first day of rioting.

Timothy Goldman, a local resident who was filming on the ground at the corner of Florence and Normandie Avenues, captured a part of the scene.

The attack has been described as a hate crime in which Denny, a white man, 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.

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.

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, and the other kicked him and hit him with a claw hammer.

News footage showed Damian Williams throwing a Cinder Block at Denny's head, then doing a football-style victory dance in the road and gesticulating gang signs at the Los Angeles News Service helicopter of Zoey Tur and Marika Gerrard.

After the beating ended, some men threw beer bottles at the unconscious body and a man searched Denny's back pockets, taking his wallet.

Tur and Gerrard reported that there was no police presence in the area.

Four black 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.

Green, also a truck driver, boarded Denny's truck and drove him to the Daniel Freeman Hospital in Inglewood.

Paramedics who attended to Denny said he suffered major trauma and came very close to dying.

Soon after Green took him to the hospital, Denny suffered a seizure.

His skull was fractured in 91 places and pushed into his brain.

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.

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.