Highway Patrol Officer Tells Of Seeing Officer Hit King In The Face

LOS ANGELES - California Highway Patrol Officer Melanie Singer left the witness stand yesterday something of a lone ranger among the law-enforcement officers at Rodney King's beating two years ago.

Singer, the only officer to testify that she saw King struck directly in the head, left jurors with an insight into police subculture amid testimony that was emotionally powerful.

When she saw a badly beaten and bleeding King lying hogtied and dirty along a road, she wanting to put on her emergency medical gloves to give him first aid, she said. But fear of ridicule by fellow officers stopped her.

"I didn't want those guys to start heckling me," she testified. Other officers were standing around joking, she said. One told her an ambulance was on its way.

Singer began the sixth week of the federal civil-rights trial of three Los Angeles police officers and one former officer. She had been called by the defense, whose lawyers expected her to corroborate testimony from other witnesses about King's bizarre behavior.

She and her partner-husband Tim Singer began the pursuit of King in the morning of March 3, 1991, when they saw his car traveling at speeds above 100 mph.

Under cross-examination yesterday, she continued to bring another perspective to the beating, favorable to the prosecution in some aspects, and to the defense in others. Singer testified, for example, that when she looked at King just after the beating, he wasn't sweating profusely; wasn't struggling against his restraints; wasn't speaking gibberish, cursing, or saying bizarre things; and didn't smell of ether, the odor of which is associated with PCP use.

Defense lawyers have claimed that a sweating, gibberish-speaking King appeared to be on PCP, a powerful hallucinogen.

Instead, King smelled and acted like a drunk, she said, one who did not want to be handcuffed.

She made another point for the defense when she said she heard none of the racial epithets King testified to hearing.

But the defense may have lost ground when she testified that she saw five more baton blows to King's head after the first one - all after he had fallen.

"There is no doubt in my mind that he (Officer Laurence Powell) struck him in the face," she testified, choking back sobs. "I will never forget it to the day I die."