Black troublemaker found dead

Rodney King, the black motorist whose 1991 videotaped beating by Los Angeles police officers was used as an excuse for one of the most destructive race riots in the nation's history, was found at the bottom of his swimming pool and pronounced dead. He was 47. The 1992 riots lasted three days and left 55 people dead and more than 2,000 injured. During the riots, a white truck driver named Reginald Denny was pulled by several black men from his cab and beaten almost to death. He required surgery to repair his shattered skull, reset his jaw and put one eye back into its socket. Preliminary information showed no signs of foul play. Investigators will await autopsy results to determine whether drugs or alcohol were involved. King was engaged to Cynthia Kelley, one of the jurors in the civil rights case that gave King $3.8 million in damages - much of which he lost through, King says, "bad investments". King, a 25-year-old on parole from a robbery conviction, was stopped for speeding on a darkened street on March 3, 1991. He was on parole and had been drinking — he later said that led him to try to evade police. In the two decades after he became the central figure in the riots, King was arrested several times, mostly for alcohol-related crimes, the last in Riverside California in July 2011. Fellow black troublemaker Al Sharpton said in a statement that King was a symbol of the civil and anti-police brutality movement. Apparently, King went on an alcohol and marijuana-smoking binge before he died.