Cautiously, she opened the door just a crack and saw the Rev. Newton on her doorstep with another man. Together, they were holding up a third man, who slumped under them, barely moving.
"I didn't even recognize him," Coralia said. Her husband's head was bloody and hideously swollen. His ear and a chunk of his chin dangled by flaps of skin.
"He smelled of gasoline and they'd painted him completely black," said Coralia, as horrified, all these years later, as if it were yesterday. Wiping away tears, she said, "Bennie Newton wanted to leave Fidel there. He said he had to go save other people, and I begged him to take Fidel to the hospital."
Getting there might be too dangerous, Newton told her, but Coralia looked at her husband and worried that if he didn't see a doctor immediately, he might not survive. Newton relented and Vanessa, 17 at the time, insisted on going to the hospital to watch over her father and report back to the family.
"I sat in the back seat with my father's head on my lap, and we put a towel and blanket over us so nobody would see us," Vanessa said. "I remember the car being stopped and they asked Bennie Newton what was back there. He just said he was trying to help the community and they let us go. When we drove away, I peeked out and saw that one of the men had a shotgun."
At Daniel Freeman Hospital, doctors sutured Lopez's gashes — and then, to the surprise of Vanessa, he was released.
"He didn't look right," Vanessa said, and he got worse at the home of a relative outside the riot zone. "He was disoriented and he kept throwing up. I told my uncle, 'This isn't right.' He'd try to get up, but he was dizzy and incoherent."
Another trip to the hospital, and an MRI, revealed a brain injury, and Lopez said it took about two years before he was well enough to return to full-time work. He did well enough to buy a couple more rental properties, but unreliable tenants, failing health, lack of work, declining real estate values and difficulty refinancing bank loans have left Fidel struggling financially.
Coralia sat next to Fidel on their living room sofa and wept as she talked about a daughter whose boyfriend was just diagnosed with cancer, and about the damaged credit Fidel suffered after co- signing a car loan for a relative who didn't make the payments.
"Twenty years later, we're worse off," said Coralia, who's looking for work as a clerk, a maid, anything. "There's so much bad luck in this family."
It's as if they're still haunted by that night, she said — by the unimaginable madness of a city gone wild, with Fidel caught in the middle of it.
"We're all crazy," Coralia said, "because we never got therapy."
They're all fine, Fidel countered, but Coralia reminded him of his nightmares.
He nodded, but didn't give much ground. And he seemed to harbor no lingering hatred toward Damian Williams, the leader of the mob that set upon him, Denny and others without mercy. Williams was sentenced to 10 years and served just four, his assault of Lopez reduced to a misdemeanor. He is now serving time in state prison for aiding in a murder at a drug house in 2000.
To some, Williams' sentence for his part in the rioting was so light, it seemed as great an injustice as the beatings themselves. But Fidel Lopez said that a harsher sentence, after the exoneration of the cops who pummeled Rodney King, might only have caused more violence. He said he understood the contained rage that cracked open after the acquittal of those officers. He told me he had African American friends before and after the riots, and he lives with the firm conviction that good and bad people come in all colors.