"Please come in," he said, smiling, as if he'd been waiting a long time for a visit.
Lopez, 67, was wearing an "Old Glory" T-shirt with an American flag on it, and he apologized for the mess in his living room. Because of financial problems, he told me, he's doing some work on the house in case he and his wife, Coralia, need to take in boarders.
Over the next couple of hours, Lopez filled me in on his
difficult recovery and the years-long challenge of reestablishing his business. Not only was he badly injured on that day in 1992, but his truck was
torched and his tools stolen by thugs who also made off with $2,000 Lopez had intended to deposit at a bank. Lopez made no appeal for sympathy as he told his story, but he still finds it unfathomable that LAPD commanders ordered officers not to intervene, leaving him and others at the mercy of mobs that pounded and plundered at will.
Lopez believes he would have been set ablaze, after being drenched with gas, if not for Newton. He and the pastor, an ex-convict whose own redemption had led him to minister to wayward souls, would later become friends.
"I even went to his church," said Lopez, who attended regularly before Newton became ill and died just a year after the riots.
Lopez's wife joined our conversation after returning from an errand. She confessed to her husband that their gas and electricity might be cut off, and she was trying to string out the deadline for a payment. Coralia, who wears the enduring trauma of the riots more visibly than her husband, was more forthcoming about Fidel's ongoing challenges than he was.
"I can't sleep close to him," Coralia said, showing me how her husband flails his arms during the nightmare that recurs all too frequently. "It's always the same. They're chasing after him."
Lopez still has a U-shaped scar and dent at the top of his forehead, his ribs still hurt from the kicks he took and he still gets the occasional dizzy spell. He said doctors long ago told him there could be permanent loss of equilibrium from the rattling of his brain.
But he was determined, after his random misfortune, to make a fresh start, as he had before. Lopez moved to the U.S. from Guatemala in 1967, after his father, a coffee grower, died of cancer in his 50s. As a boy, Fidel had known Coralia in Guatemala, and although they came to the U.S. separately, they reconnected and were married here. They became U.S. citizens and worked hard as they raised three lovely daughters: Vanessa, Melissa and Aileen. They bought a house in South L.A., and Fidel was returning home after repairs at a rental property when his truck got boxed in by rioters at Florence and Normandie.