How an original Rooftop Korean got red-pilled: These protests are not organic
They became the stuff of Second Amendment lore — young men with firearms, patrolling the streets and positioned on rooftops in the Koreatown neighborhood during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.Thirty years later, as the City of Angels again faces threats of anarchy, coupled with a defunded and demoralized police force, many people recall the group of men — later known as the Rooftop Koreans — who took it upon themselves to bulwark their community.“Back then, I didn’t really have any skin in the game, so to speak,” Tony Moon, now 53, tells The Post.As the fires and looting crept north from South Central to Koreatown, Moon’s father no longer had a business in the neighborhood.
In fact, the family was living in nearby Hollywood.But a friend’s brother asked for assistance protecting his stereo-equipment store on Hoover Street, and Moon, then 19, joined the militia of around 75 men to patrol the neighborhood from looters and vandals.It worked.
Bedlam gripped the city — the LAPD had stood down to the rioters — but Koreatown remained unscorched.The ’92 riots erupted on a Wednesday after four LAPD officers were acquitted in a police brutality case in which they were caught on video beating suspect Rodney King, who was black, during an arrest after a high-speed chase for driving while intoxicated.The unrest lasted six days and would become the most destructive civil disruption in US history, leaving 63 people dead, thousands injured and a billion dollars in property damage.\LA Koreans felt particularly vulnerable; tensions with the black community were at an all-time high.
A Korean shop owner in South Central the previous year shot and killed 15-year-old Latasha Harlins following a struggle when the woman accused the girl of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice.The shopkeeper was found guilty but sentenced only to probation, enraging the black community.In response, that year rapper Ice Cube released “Black Korea,” a track full of anti-Asian raci...