Rodney King Dead: Fiancé Finds Him at Bottom of Swimming Pool

CNN reports (via Memeorandum).

Rodney King was found at the bottom of his swimming pool at his home in Rialto early Sunday, authorities said.

King’s fiancé called 911 about 5:25 a.m. and said she found King at the bottom of his pool, Sgt. Paul Stella told The Times. Officers pulled him from the pool and began CPR until paramedics arrived and took King to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton.

King was pronounced dead at the hospital at 6:11 a.m., Stella said.

Preliminary information indicated King drowned and there were no immediate signs of foul play, Stella said.

An autopsy will be conducted.

King was drunk and unarmed when he was pulled over in 1991 for speeding by Los Angeles Police Department officers, who responded to his erratic behavior by kicking him and striking him dozens of times with their batons.

The incident was captured on video by a civilian bystander, and the recording became an instant international sensation.

Four of the officers were tried for excessive force. Their acquittal on April 29, 1992, touched off one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history.

Continue reading at the link.

Dennis Prager discussed Rodney King in his book, Still the Best Hope. Prager mentioned King while discussing the left's shopworn "socioeconomic circumstances" theory to explain (and justify) black crime. And Prager cited King in a footnote:

The 1992 riots provide a perfect example. The Left did not blame the arson or the beatings and shooting of innocent non-blacks, especially Korean-Americans, on the blacks who committed these acts. They blamed white America and the allegedly racist police brutality they contended occurred during the arrest of a black man named Rodney King. The liberal news media were very largely responsible for creating the frenzy, indeed the hysteria, in America, and especially in black America, that led to these riots. For weeks, national and local news shows repeatedly televised a tiny segment of a video showing white police officers beating a black man identified only as "a black mortorist." The "black mortorist" was in fact a convicted criminal who was finally caught by police after a long car chase at high speeds through residential neighborhoods. One part of the video never shown on American television showed King refusing police orders to exit his car and to lie down to be frisked. The members of the jury were among the only Americans to see the entire video, which is why they acquitted the police officers. And that acquittal was the ostensible reason for the riots, fires, beatings, and murders.

More at Memeorandum, including this headline at Gawker which substantiates Prager's argument: "Rodney King, Victim of Police Brutality That Spawned L.A. Riots, Dead at 47."

But see TMZ, "RODNEY KING: Drinking, Smoking Weed Before Drowning."

ADDED: At the Los Angeles Times, "Rev. Al Sharpton calls Rodney King a 'symbol of civil rights'."