Reporter's notebook: Riots or uprising? 25 years since the Rodney King verdict, a Korean American story

— -- Korean Americans often don't like to air their dirty laundry. I can say that, having been born in Korea myself and raised from age 5 in Sunnyvale, California.

I feel fully American, but I know many in our culture stay silent about things they find painful or shameful or both. It’s part of why so much of what happened in the Korean American community during those five days of lawlessness known as the L.A. riots has remained invisible in the 25 years since.

A split-second decision on where to aim his gun

Richard Kim has never told his story publicly, until now.

In 1992, on Day Two of the riots, after hearing his mom had been shot, Richard rushed to his parents' store armed with his legally-obtained Ruger semi-automatic rifle. When Richard came upon the scene, he says the chaos and gunfire in the streets looked like news footage he’d seen out of war zones in Beirut.

The police seemed to Richard to be nowhere in sight. As in the South Central area of Los Angeles, they appeared to have pulled back from Koreatown. Richard pulled out his weapon and took cover.

“The shooters were 25 to 30 feet away,” Richard says. “I leaned over and I made a conscious decision to shoot the cars that they were standing next to.”

To this day, he has no idea why he chose to aim for the cars instead of the shooters. “I could have taken them out,” he says quietly. Instead, he vividly recalls unloading his 30-round clip into a car -- filling the street corner with smoke from the gunfire.

“As soon as that happened, I could hear them getting in their cars and, you know, tires screeching”.

That split-second decision is, he says, the reason we’re not talking to him from behind bars.

'You can't take our weapons'

Richard’s mom told me it took hours for someone to drive her to the hospital which was flooded with casualties from the street fighting. At first, she didn't even realize she’d been shot. “I looked down and there was blood spilling down,” she said.

Meanwhile, the police arrived on the scene.

Richard was thrilled at first, but then officers immediately handcuffed him. His own fiancée saw it on live television.

“He was on his knees. He was being handcuffed along with some of his employees," said Tina Kim, his now-wife of two decades. “My heart just dropped to the pit of my stomach, and I couldn't make sense of any of what I was seeing on TV.”

The police heard reports that Korean Americans had been shooting wildly into the crowds. They searched, but couldn't find a single injured person. Eventually, they let Richard go, but told him the Los Angeles Police Department was under strict orders to confiscate any weapons they came across.

“Will you come back to protect us and our businesses if those guys come back?” Richard remembers asking them. “We can’t do that,” they said matter of factly.

“Then you can’t take our weapons. You’ll leave us sitting ducks,” Richard said.

Richard says the cop looked him in the eye for a long time, and then silently gave him back his rifle.