Bystander recorded police beating of Rodney King
George Holliday, the plumber who videotaped White Los Angeles police officers beating Black motorist Rodney King in 1991, capturing a brutal attack that became a symbol of racial injustice and helped spark a week of deadly riots after the officers were acquitted, died Sept. 19 at a hospital in Simi Valley, Calif. He was believed to be 61.
The cause was complications of COVID-19, said his friend Robert Wollenweber. Holliday had been hospitalized with the coronavirus for about a month.
Shot in grainy black and white, the video of King’s beating was played and replayed on hundreds of television stations, seared into the national consciousness as the police officers went on trial and parts of Los Angeles went up in flames. The video was an early example of the power of citizen journalism, in which a bystander with a camcorder or cellphone could document a historic event that might otherwise be overlooked.
It was also one of the first videos to capture an act of police brutality, specifically against an unarmed Black man, and expose it to a wide audience. “The Rodney King video was the Jackie Robinson of police videos,” the Rev. Al Sharpton told the New York Times last year. In June, the Pulitzer Prize board awarded a special citation to another citizen journalist, Darnella Frazier, whose cellphone footage of George Floyd’s murder sparked a national reckoning over racial justice and police misconduct.
Holliday said he had no grand intentions when he picked up his new Sony Handycam on the early morning of March 3, 1991. He had been awakened around 12:45 a.m. by police sirens and a low-flying helicopter and went out on his apartment balcony in Lake View Terrace to see what was happening, bulky camera in hand. “You know how it is when you have a new piece of technology,” he later told the Times. “You film anything and everything.”
As he looked through the viewfinder, Holliday saw King forced to the ground, where police kicked him, shot him with Tasers and beat him with batons, breaking his cheekbone, skull bones and ankle. “It felt like I was an inch from death,” King later said.
The attack followed an eight-mile chase in which King, who had been drinking and was on parole for a robbery conviction, tried to avoid being stopped for speeding.
Holliday, who grew up in Argentina, recalled wondering what the man could have done to deserve such an attack. “I came from a different culture, where people would get disappeared with no due process,” he said in a video interview. “Police would pick people up on suspicion. I didn’t expect this in the U.S.” He went back to sleep, then filmed a friend running the Los Angeles Marathon and went to a wedding with his wife.