WITNESSES SAY THEY SAW POLICE BEAT KING

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 27, 1993                   TAG: 9302270125
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES                                LENGTH: Short
WITNESSES SAY THEY SAW POLICE BEAT KING
A woman and man testifying in public for the first time said Friday they saw police beating and kicking a compliant Rodney King. The woman said King screamed out, "Please stop!"
Dorothy Gibson broke down in tears after recalling the violent scene she saw from her apartment patio on March 3, 1991.
"He didn't do anything," Gibson said of King. "He was just dodging blows. He was on the ground. It seemed I heard him scream out, `Please stop!' "
"And what else did you see?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Barry Kowalski asked.
"They were kicking him. I saw them kicking him with their feet on both sides of his body," she said. "On his feet, his shoulders, any way they could get a lick at him."
"Can you approximate how many times the officers struck the man with their sticks?" Kowalski said after she left the witness stand to demonstrate how the officers stomped and kicked King. "So many times, I couldn't tell," Gibson said.
Defense lawyers suggested in cross-examination that Gibson was too far away to see anything clearly and that she had embellished her account from watching a videotape of the beating.
But she said she had never seen the tape because she didn't want to look at the scene again. - Associated Press
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB