More than 30 years after footage of Rodney King’s brutal assault at the hands of LAPD shocked the country, his daughter watched video released on Friday of Tyre Nichols being fatally beaten by Memphis police. The similarities were heartbreaking.
“It’s sickening. I don’t feel well. It’s not a good feeling. I don’t wish that upon anybody’s family,” Lora Dene King, 38, tells Rolling Stone. “I don’t think anyone should go through something like that. I don’t see how people are okay, because I’m not. I’m human, and if you’re human, you shouldn’t be okay with that video.”
Lora was seven years old when her dad was struck with batons, kicked, and Tasered by a group of LAPD officers in a shameful show of police brutality captured on the new camcorder of neighborhood witness George Holliday in March 1991.
Unlike Nichols, King survived his attack. But he was never the same, Lora says.
“Even though he didn’t physically die, a big part of him died that night. He suffered permanent brain damage,” she says. “He wasn’t okay. He never was after that day. I wasn’t okay, so I can only imagine what my dad felt.” (King died from an accidental drowning in June 2012 at age 47.)
Lora spoke to Rolling Stone Friday evening outside a theater in Inglewood, Calif., after joining community activists including Najee Ali to watch the video of Nichols’s beating.
She was horrified that the clips released by Memphis Police paralleled many details of her father’s case, including the flippant manner adopted by the officers. In Nichols’s case, the officers were captured on bodycam video boasting about how they chased and beat the 29-year-old Black man. Some of them were laughing. Lora recalled how one of her father’s arresting officers, Laurence Powell, referred to her King’s beating as hitting “a home run.”
“That man was begging for his life. He begged for his mother,” she said of Nichols. “That’s sick to me. That’s very sick. I don’t even know what to feel about that, that’s weird to me… [And] they were referencing as if was on drugs, or whatever the case may be. That doesn’t justify killing a man or beating him to death. It doesn’t justify it.”
Lora, now the mother of a three-year-old son, was saddened that three decades after her dad’s beating and more than two years after George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police, not one of the cops on the scene in Memphis intervened to save Nichols.
“I definitely think more training is necessary but obviously the training that’s being produced is not working, because it’s the same thing,” Lora says.
She believes officers should undergo routine mental evaluations. “It shouldn’t just be when they’re sworn in. It should be a regular thing. Because nobody human could do something like that,” she says. “They’re exposed to different things that normal people are not.”
To those who might defend the officers’ actions, saying Nichols ran away, Lora points out that the Memphis officers were aggressive from the start and fired a Taser at him when he was unarmed and cooperating.
“I don’t promote running, but then again, if you see repetitive things of Black men being murdered, you’re going to run too, because, what else do you do?” she says. “When they initially pulled him over, he was like, ‘What are you pulling me over?’ He was very respectful. And they were cussing – every cuss word you can think of I heard out of their mouth. That’s unnecessary.”
Nichols died on Jan. 10 from his injuries. The officers who beat Nichols have been charged with murder. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the Justice Department, and the FBI are investigating.
She lamented that Nichols cried out for his mother as his life started to slip away just 100 yards from her home. “He was begging them. He was begging for his life.”