‘No One Else Made a Move to Help’

From the moment I saw Tam Tran kneeling on the ground bleeding profusely from a deep gash on her cheek, I knew something had to be done to help her.

Someone had thrown a brick through her car window as she drove near Normandie and Florence avenues Wednesday night. She had stumbled from her car and was on her knees as I drove up to cover nearby looting and violence in the wake of the not guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial.

Her car had come to a stop on the sidewalk and several of the windows were broken. Anger was clearly in the air, an atmosphere I had seen earlier as I approached the intersection. People were shouting and throwing rocks, and I had seen an attack on the driver directly in front of me.

As a crowd began to form around the stunned Tran, it seemed that there was a brief opportunity to get her to safety.

A woman rushed to her side and screamed: “You need to get out of here. If you don’t get out of here they will kill you.”

No one else in the crowd made a move to help and there wasn’t a policeman in sight.

As a reporter, I’m trained to not involve myself personally in a story, but it was clear that if someone didn’t act, Tran might have been more seriously injured.

So I helped her to my car and we drove to Daniel Freeman Hospital in Inglewood. It was a frightening ride.

One man stood in the middle of the street warning motorists to turn back. “There’s a riot down there!” he yelled. “You don’t want to go down there.”

At one point a car stopped next to mine and the driver mouthed obscenities at Tran. I realized that we weren’t out of danger and told her to duck down.

Until then I thought that since I am a black man we would have no trouble getting out of the area.

The hospital emergency room was filled with other victims. A postman, a truck driver, a law student and a reporter for United Press International. All had either been pulled from their cars, hit with thrown objects or kicked.

Several residents had driven them to safety.

Tran, still stunned, didn’t have much to say after she was treated for the gash on her head and cuts on her hands.

“They threw a brick though my window, took my purse, my wallet and all my papers,” said Tran, who left Vietnam two years ago by boat with her grandparents. “Can I go back tonight and get my car?” asked Tran, a manicurist who works in South-Central Los Angeles

“I don’t think you want to get your car tonight,” I said.

“I’m not upset or angry,” family member Duong Nguyen said. “I just don’t understand why it happened. She got caught in the middle of something.”

By this time, hospital officials had figured out that I was a reporter and they asked me to leave.