Bystander who videotaped L.A. police beating Rodney King dies
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 in his early 60s.
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.
Holliday said he met King only once, when King called his name at a gas station, about a year after the riots. “I looked over and I didn’t recognize him because the only pictures I had seen of him were of his face all swollen and beaten up, but now he’d recovered,” Holliday told the British tabloid the Sun. “He could tell that I didn’t know who he was and he said, ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ I said, ‘No.’
“He said, ‘Well, you saved my life.’ “
Holliday occasionally discussed his own life with journalists, saying that his mother was German and his father was a British executive at Shell oil. His job caused the family to move frequently: Holliday was born in Canada, lived in Indonesia and spent most of his childhood in Argentina before coming to Los Angeles around 1980 in search of work.
One of his grandfathers had been a police officer in London. “I always had and I still do have - a high opinion of the police,” he told the Sun in March. “I think they’re given a very bad rap, one they don’t deserve. They do a lot of good things and you never see anybody talk about that stuff.”
Holliday said he bought his Sony Handycam as a Valentine’s Day gift for his first wife, Maria. Before filming King, he shot footage of Arnold Schwarzenegger acting in a scene from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” at a bar across the street from his home.
He was later twice divorced, according to a 2006 account in the Los Angeles Times, and scraped by as a self-employed plumber. He said that while he never filmed the police beating to make money, he felt used by TV stations that broadcast his footage while giving him little credit and no compensation. By his account, he received $500 from KTLA, but no more than a few thousand dollars in all for licensing the video.
The original tape was confiscated by law enforcement while the beating was being investigated, and Holliday tried unsuccessfully to get it back. The FBI did eventually return his Sony Handycam, which he tried to auction last year for $225,000. He told the New York Times he hoped the auction would “inspire people to use their cameras for everything, the bad and the good.”
“People can accuse other people of doing stuff,” he added. “But when it’s on camera, it’s different. You just can’t argue with it.”
Holliday had hoped to buy a home with the auction money, but he had no bidders, according to the Sun. “I’ve been a plumber for 43 years,” he said. “It looks like I’m going to have to be a plumber for quite a few more years.”