Immigrants’ Paths Cross During Violence : Rescue: A Korean woman dragged a dazed and beaten Israeli to safety to protect him from an angry mob shortly after the Rodney G. King verdicts were announced.

They are immigrants from different parts of the globe. They did not know one another before the incident. They have not met since.

A Korean and an Israeli, two people who just happened to be together at the precise moment when American rage, home-grown and blind to anything but skin color, exploded the afternoon of April 29.

Sammy Botach said he went back last week looking for Joung Hi Kwon. But the Inglewood gasoline station and mini-market where she worked as a cashier had been burned to the ground.

He wanted to pay her the $15 he owed for the new water hose on his car. Most of all, he wanted to thank her for saving his life.

“She grabbed (me). She pushed me inside that little room. I think it was the bathroom,” said Botach, recalling how Kwon hid him from an angry mob that had already attacked him twice on the evening the riots broke out.

“I don’t have time (to) ask (the) white man nothing,” said Kwon, grabbing a visitor by the collar to demonstrate how she dragged a dazed and beaten Botach to safety. “I put him in (the) restroom . . . and (closed) the door.”

A Los Angeles businessman with rental properties in Inglewood, Botach, 41, was headed home the Wednesday afternoon the verdicts were announced in the trial of four officers charged with beating Rodney G. King. He turned into Nam’s Arco station on Century Boulevard near Crenshaw Avenue because of problems with his water hose.

He said he hardly noticed Kwon inside behind the cash register. A divorced mother who supported herself and two children, the 44-year-old Kwon had worked at the station for seven years.

Botach and Kwon remember the group of young men standing around outside the station, which was not unusual, Kwon said.

Botach recalls watching a service station attendant finish up work under the hood of his car, when a young man walked up to tell the group that a Simi Valley jury had found four white policemen not guilty of assault in the beating of King and that rioting had broken out a few blocks away.

The reaction was instant anger, Botach said. Then, Botach recalled, he heard the words, “Here’s one white man.” Seconds later, a strong blow to the side of his face sent him sprawling to the ground.

Almost as quickly as it began, the attention of the young men was diverted elsewhere, if only briefly, giving Botach time to get to his feet and stumble into the garage portion of the station. Kwon said she quickly told the two station attendants, “Hurry up, hide the white man.”

Before anyone had time, however, the youths returned, beat Botach yet again, took his money and car keys, and struck out as well at the two station attendants who tried to aid him.

“A whole bunch, six or seven people, beat him,” Kwon recalled. “They kicked him just like this,” she said, stomping on the living room floor of the small apartment she shares with her two children in Southeast Los Angeles County.

The young men, she said, yelled at her: “Don’t call police. If (you) call police, (we will) kill everybody.”

Nevertheless, Kwon leaned hard on a silent alarm button that summoned the Inglewood police, though not before the group left the area.

Botach told police and paramedics who arrived that he did not think he needed a hospital and would be all right if taken to a safe place where he could call his brother to come get him.

Kwon said the police, by then receiving dozens of other calls as rioting spread in and around Inglewood, left the scene. Kwon and the two attendants rushed to close the station and take Botach out of the area with them, but by then the riot had exploded into full force.

A trio of stores next door was burning, set afire by looters, Kwon said. And before the group in the station could leave, Kwon said, she saw the same group of young men, swelled in numbers and carrying what she described as sticks, heading back to the station.

They were yelling, “I hate white man, kill him,” Kwon said. “(The) first time they robbed him. This time, I knew they (would) kill him. This time it (was) different.”

Moving swiftly, she grabbed Botach, pushed him to the back of the garage and into the small restroom. She locked the door.

“I was shaking,” Botach said. “I thought, ‘My God, it’s going to come.’ I heard them say something. It wasn’t very clear. I think they were searching for something.”

The youths, seeing Botach’s car outside, were searching for him, Kwon said. Kwon told them Botach had gone.

With the riot and his beating behind him, Botach last week groped for words to describe the degree of fear and helplessness he experienced.

“I was in two wars in Israel,” he said. “I got shot in my legs. . . . At that time I wasn’t afraid so much. This time, you’re helpless. You cannot defend yourself; you cannot do anything.”

Kwon, who immigrated to the United States in 1974 with her former husband and two small children, said she did not fear for herself because the people in the neighborhood have known her for years.

“I wasn’t thinking about me, just only about that guy over there. Everybody was mad at white people then,” she said.

When it seemed safe, Kwon said, she put Botach in one of the attendant’s cars and the two men drove to a nearby Ralph’s grocery store. There was a security guard there, Botach said, explaining that he thought it would be a safe place to call his brother.

When he got out of the car in front of the store, though, a young black woman rushed up to warn him away. “Get out, get out fast from here,” Botach quoted her as saying.

Botach and the attendant drove out of the area to safety.

Kwon, meanwhile, spent two harrowing hours getting across Los Angeles to her home. “I thought that night I would die,” she said, tears creasing her cheeks as she described seeing fires and people being dragged from their cars.

“Everybody was driving crazy. . . . They blocked (intersections) with trash cans. I looked for streets (that were safe), turning again and again. (I thought) maybe they would try to kill me because I am Oriental.”

The next night, the gasoline station was burned to the ground. Tears traced her cheeks a second time as she tried to talk about the owner and his family, whom she said treated her like family. It is doubtful, she said, that the owner can afford to rebuild. Kwon has a new job in a grocery store, but it pays less than she earned at the station.

Her decision to come to Botach’s aid, even if risky for her, was automatic, Kwon said.

“I don’t care if they are black people, white people, Oriental people, any innocent people they try to kill, I have to cover them.”