Blacks Save Deli Where Girl Was Slain -- They Had Their Reasons For Putting Out The Fire

LOS ANGELES - A little south and a bit east of where the fury of last week spent itself, the store where Latasha Harlins died still stands.

That it is still there is not for want of trying.

Four times last Wednesday night, when the chances of getting a firefighter were nil, someone tried to put a torch to Empire Liquor Market Deli.

Four times, with buckets and garbage cans of water, black men, women and children blotted the fires out.

Someone, during Wednesday's wild, night-long rancor, had remembered that history of a wretched sort was made at Empire Liquor.

Thirteen days after Rodney King was beaten at the far suburban edge of Los Angeles, Latasha Harlins, a black teenager, died there, in the city's urban heart.

Her death, too, was videotaped.

The flat eye of an automated store camera watched as she grappled with a Korean-American storekeeper over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, then was shot in the head.

Soon Ja Du, the storekeeper, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, and placed on five years of probation.

There was anger at the killing, bitterness at the sentencing.

It certainly was not its history that saved Empire Liquor. It was the people living next door, in the 14 units of the Webb Motel with its daily-weekly-monthly rates.

They all put out the fires, said the co-manager of the motel, Sherriell Johnson, and they all stayed up half the night, to make sure nobody would try it again.

For in their common wall, the Korean-American-owned store and the black-managed motel also share a common peril. What happened Wednesday night could serve as a metaphor for the whole city.

The fire was a blazing corona up a wall and started across the ceiling when Howard Birkley ran next door from the motel to help put it out.

"There's a lot of people talk about burning it down. I tell 'em, if it goes up at night, with these kids here, somebody's gonna get killed - another kid is gonna get killed."

And no one around here is inclined to see the owners collect fire insurance.

Its owners closed it down and boarded it up. In the days and weeks after Harlins died, picketers laid first claim to the shuttered store. Across the front, they hung a butcher-paper banner - "closed for murder & disrespect of black people" - on which others added their own injunction: "Burn this mother down!"

Denise Harlins, one of the dead girl's aunts, helped put out the fire because she has her own plans for Empire Liquor.

"I would like to see that building become something . . . some type of a cultural center."