'She was just a regular teenage girl,' Harlins says. Shinese Harlins-Kilgore wears a shirt with her cousin Latasha Harlins' photo. 'His smile was electric to me,' she says. When she thinks of her father now, she doesn't think of that video. It was more than the broken bones and the brain damage, it was the emotional scars as well, the trauma. Rodney King survived that beating, but his daughter says he carried its scars until he died in 2012. When she saw him afterwards, she didn't recognize his face. Lora King thought she was watching her father die.
As she looked around at the faces of her family, she realized it was her dad. Lora King was 7 years old when she saw the black and white video on television news, grainy footage of four police officers savagely beating a Black man.įirst, she thought how odd it was, that this man on the TV shared her father's name. Latasha, 15, was fatally shot in a liquor store. Shinese Harlins-Kilgore, cousin of Latasha Harlins and CEO of the Latasha Harlins Foundation, receives a hug from Lora King, daughter of Rodney King and CEO of the Rodney King Foundation, during the 30th anniversary of the Rodney King Civil Unrest HOPE Community Bus Tour Press conference in Los Angeles.
