Witness who took video of police beating Rodney King in Los Angeles dies of COVID

A Los Angeles plumber whose video showing police beating Rodney King in 1991 sparked a worldwide outcry has died of COVID-19.

George Holliday died Sunday of complications from the coronavirus after being hospitalized for about a month in Simi Valley, the Los Angeles Times reported.

He was not vaccinated, according to The Associated Press.

Holliday, 61, had continued to work as a plumber after taking the famous video until falling ill, the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

In March 1991, Holliday shot a grainy black-and-white video of Los Angeles police beating King after pulling him over using his new video camera from an apartment balcony, The Washington Post reported.

“You know how it is when you have a new piece of technology,” Holliday told The New York Times in 2020. “You film anything and everything.”

The video sparked worldwide outrage, leading to a 1992 trial in which the four officers were acquitted that prompted days of rioting in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Holliday once told the British tabloid The Sun that he encountered King about a year later at a gas station. “He said, ‘Well, you saved my life,’” Holliday recalled.

King died at age 47 in Rialto, California, in an accidental drowning in 2012, the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

“The King family will be forever grateful to George Holliday, who had the courage and conviction to hold the LAPD accountable in their brutal beating of my father, Rodney,” Lora Dene King, his daughter, said in a statement Monday, according to the publication. “Our condolences are extended to his family and friends.”

This story was originally published September 21, 2021 at 7:58 AM with the headline "Witness who took video of police beating Rodney King in Los Angeles dies of COVID."