Rodney King, the black motorist whose 1991 videotaped beating by Los Angeles police officers was the touchstone for one of the most destructive race riots in US history, has been found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool. He was 47.
King's fiancee called police to report she had found him in the pool at their home in Rialto, California, police officer. Dean Hardin said.
Officers arrived to find King unresponsive in the water, Mr Hardin said. He was transported to Arrowhead Regional Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
There were no signs of foul play, Hardin said. The San Bernardino County coroner will perform a post-mortem examination within 48 hours.
The 1992 riots, which were set off by the acquittals of the officers who beat King, lasted three days and left 55 people dead, more than 2,000 injured and swathes of Los Angeles on fire. At the height of the violence, King pleaded on television: "Can we all get along?"
King was stopped for speeding on a darkened street on March 3 1991. Four Los Angeles police officers hit him more than 50 times with their batons, kicked him and shot him with stun guns.
A man who had quietly stepped outside his home to observe the commotion videotaped most of it and turned a copy over to a TV station. It was played over and over for the following year, inflaming racial tensions across the country.
It seemed that the videotape would be the key evidence to a guilty verdict against the officers, whose trial was moved to the predominantly white suburb of Simi Valley, California. Instead, on April 29, 1992, a jury with no black members acquitted three of the officers; a mistrial was declared for a fourth.
Violence erupted immediately, starting in South Los Angeles. Police, seemingly caught off-guard, were quickly outnumbered by rioters and retreated. As the uprising spread to the city's Koreatown area, shop owners armed themselves and engaged in running gun battles with looters.
In the two decades after he became the central figure in the riots, King was arrested several times, mostly for alcohol-related crimes. He later became a record company executive and a reality TV star, appearing on shows such as Celebrity Rehab. In an interview earlier this year, King said he was a happy man. "America's been good to me after I paid the price and stayed alive through it all," he said at the time. "This part of my life is the easy part now."
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