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"   Published in the December 2012 issue Kurt Steeter, Reporter, Los Angeles Times June 17, 2012; 5:25 a.m. My wife and I had just arrived for vacation. We were traveling with our twenty-month-old, and we got in late and were just beat-down tired. I was sound asleep when my phone started blowing up.  The first few messages were actually pretty ambiguous:  &amp;quot;Did you hear about Rodney?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Wow, too bad, condolences.&amp;quot;  And then in one message, somebody finally mentioned that Glen passed away. It was like getting punched because I&amp;#039;d just spent a pretty significant amount of time with him. His friends and family called him Glen, but history will remember him as Rodney. He answered to both. I called him both. It just felt natural. I met him this year to write about the twentieth anniversary of the L. A. riots and the autobiography he had coming out. We&amp;#039;d hung out at his house in Rialto, eaten some meals, driven around, gone fishing with worms we&amp;#039;d dug out of his backyard, behind the pool. He loved that pool. That is the most ironic part of the story, without a doubt, him drowning in that little pool he was so proud of, where he&amp;#039;d inscribed the dates of his beating and the riots. One time there were, like, two leaves floating on the surface of the water, and he had to stop everything to dip them out.  As you got to know Glen, you realized he was obviously broken \u2014 a broken, battered, and bruised individual in very real ways, physically and mentally. It was partly his own doing and, of course, largely from the beating. A lot of people think of him as this big brute, but he had a real kind of gentleness about him. He was kind of a lost soul. You just wanted to take him under your wing and care for him. I think a lot of people who met him felt the same way.  But you could also see that there was another side to him. I remember thinking, I wouldn&amp;#039;t want to be around this guy if he was really hopped up on whatever, because he could get a little out there. You know, he had a little bit of that dark side. He&amp;#039;s probably not one of the most book-smart guys, and in a lot of ways you could make a case that he&amp;#039;s not the smartest guy for doing the kind of things he did all his life, but I think he had a certain intelligence, if not in the traditional sense.  Glen talked a lot about his place in history, very openly and honestly, and often in really grandiose terms. Like, &amp;quot;Because I was beaten and then the riots happened, that helped eventually heal society.&amp;quot; He even said that because of his beating, &amp;quot;eventually Obama happened.&amp;quot;  When you walk into his house, one of the first things you see is a picture of him above the fireplace giving the famous &amp;quot;Can&amp;#039;t we all get along?&amp;quot; speech. One time he told me, &amp;quot;I could have told everybody &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s burn this motherfucker down,&amp;#039; you know? But instead I got up and said, &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s have some peace.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; And, by the way, he came up with that line himself. His lawyers had given him this prepared speech that was several pages, and I don&amp;#039;t think he wanted to try to read it. That moment was really important to him. He was very proud he&amp;#039;d said what he said. He&amp;#039;s certainly not proud of getting beaten. The speech was something he actually did, not something that was done to him, I guess.  \u2014As told to Mike Sager READ MORE FROM THE ORAL HISTORY OF 2012 "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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