George Holliday, who filmed Rodney King video, dies of COVID-19

LOS ANGELES (AP) – George Holliday, the Los Angeles plumber who shot a grainy video of four white cops beating black motorist Rodney King in 1991, died of complications from COVID-19, a friend said on Monday.

Holliday, 61, died in a Los Angeles hospital on Sunday, where he had been for more than a month, according to Robert Wollenweber, a longtime friend and former colleague. Holliday was not vaccinated and had been on a ventilator for the past few days after contracting pneumonia, Wollenweber said.

Holliday was awakened by a traffic stop outside his San Fernando Valley home on the night of March 3, 1991. He went out to film it with his new video camera, catching the Los Angeles officers hitting, kicking. kick and use a stun gun on King, even after being on the ground.

A year later, the blurry footage of Holliday – lasting around 9 minutes – was key evidence in the criminal trial of the four officers for assault and excessive use of force.

When a jury acquitted all the officers on April 29, 1992, the city erupted into widespread violence. Hundreds of businesses were looted and destroyed over several days. Entire blocks of houses and shops were set on fire. More than 60 people have died from gunfire and other violence, mostly in southern Los Angeles.

The uprising appeared to take the rest of the nation by surprise, but longtime locals said tensions had been building up in southern LA for years and that the king’s verdict was just the tipping point.

On the third day of the riots, King went on television to plead for calm, asking in a trembling voice, “Can we all get along?

King sued Los Angeles for the beating and was awarded $ 3.8 million in 1994, but he told The Associated Press in 2012 that he lost most of that money to bad investments. King drowned in his backyard pool on June 17, 2012, at the age of 47.

Holliday’s death was first reported by TMZ.com.

Holliday put the Sony camcorder he used to record the move up to auction last July, with auctions starting at $ 225,000. We didn’t know if he had already sold.

Holliday told the New York Times last year that he still worked as a plumber and had never taken advantage of the video.

He said he bought the camera about a month earlier and grabbed it instinctively when he was woken up by the noise outside his window.

“You know what it’s like when you have new technology,” he told The Times. “You film anything and everything.”

Holliday said in 2017 that he was working on a documentary about his role in the King Affair, but it was not clear if anything had happened to that project.