George Holliday, man who filmed Rodney King video that forever changed L.A., dies of COVID at 61

[Demovictory9]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/george-holliday-man-who-filmed-rodney-king-video-that-forever-changed-l-a-dies/ar-AAOEhEY?ocid=msedgntp


The video was less than nine minutes long, dark, grainy and badly out of focus. But it changed L.A. in ways that were unfathomable and dragged George Holliday into a life he never bargained for.

Shot with a bulky Sony Super8 Handycam, the video of the Rodney King beating in 1991 tore open a city already heaving with racial tension, an era when the Los Angeles Police Department was all but an occupying force in the city's Black neighborhoods, arriving with tanks, battering rams and brute force.


And when the four officers who beat King were acquitted the following year, the city exploded in protest and violence, thick smoke curling into the sky from Koreatown to South L.A. By the time it was over, more than 50 people had been killed and more than 2,300 were injured. The scars — both to the city's urban core and to the psyches of its residents — remained in plain view for decades.

For Holliday, it was like being hurled over a cliff. Reporters lurked outside his Lake View Terrace apartment, death threats arrived in the mail, and his efforts to receive just compensation for one of the most infamous videos of the time vaporized again and again.

Still hard at work as a plumber, Holliday died Sunday of complications of COVID-19, said Robert Wollenweber, a fellow plumber and close friend. Holliday was 61 and had been in a Simi Valley hospital since mid-August.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/george-holliday-man-who-filmed-rodney-king-video-that-forever-changed-l-a-dies/ar-AAOEhEY?ocid=msedgntp

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Historic filmmaker.

Whose Streets? Police Violence and the Recorded Image

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/8/4/155/htm

COVID-19 makes me so angry, I can’t write. Police brutality makes me so angry, I have to write.