LOS ANGELES, California-Rodney King (pictured), whose 1991 brutal and videotaped beating by a group of White Los Angeles policemen generated a week of costly riots that killed 55 people and heightened racial tensions across the country after a predominantly White jury acquitted the officers was found dead Sun. afternoon in his swimming pool in a home he shared with his fiancee in Rialto, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb. (Watch the video of the beating at www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com) .
He was 47, and there was no evidence of foul play, police said.
Famous for going off script from his lawyers and saying "can we all get along?" at a press conference calling for peace around the riots, King publicly admitted that he had alcohol and drug abuse problems.
Cynthia Kelley, whom King was scheduled to marry, made the 911 call crying and told police that she heard a thump outside and then saw King at the bottom of the pool.
Police were unable to revive him.
Autopsy reports are expected later this week.
King, who once told reporters that he had no money left from a lawsuit settlement in conjunction with the beating after greedy lawyers and arbitrators hearing their impropriety did him in, had just gotten a advance for a book as to this year's 21 anniversary of the celebrated case.
His case, a symbol of the unrest between police and the Black community in majority Black major metropolitan cities nationally, garnered America's attention after he tried to run after a 100 mile per hour police chase when out on parole for a robbery conviction in 1989. He said later that he feared them.
Police kicked King and beat him with batons, causing a limp and other permanent injuries they he never totally recovered from. Caught on video by a by-stander, the beating escalated the strained relationship between police and the Black men that resent them.
Though acquitted of criminal charges in the first trial, some of the police involved with the beating were later convicted in federal district court and sentenced to short prison terns.
King said that he never fit the bill as the Civil Rights activist that Black leaders wanted him to become. He was liked though, and in later years said that the incident had created some changes in police procedures , and more awareness of what Black men routinely face because of overlooked police brutality and racism.
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