UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS--SIX MONTHS LATER : Touched by Fire / A Legacy of Pain and Hope : THE JUROR : Replaying Scenes of a Drama That She Can’t Forget

Virginia Loya is magnetically drawn to images of last spring’s riots.

News accounts of the events consume her, but she cannot say why. When she tries to explain, her words trail off.

Then, suddenly she is reliving her ordeal in the Simi Valley jury room, where she paced around the table to relieve tension while other Ventura County jurors argued bitterly over the four white Los Angeles police officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney G. King.

“I don’t think it’s something I’ll ever. . . .”

She pauses, staring distractedly out the window of her little wooden house in rural Saticoy.

Picking at the chipped red polish on her nails, she starts and stops again.

“It’s something I’ll never. . . .” She sighs, groping for words to explain the duty, the experience. “It’s part of my life now. It’s something I’ll always go through or think about. It’s just something I had to do.”

Has it changed her?

“I don’t know,” Loya, 42, says. She feels the same, but all around her are signs that the trial and explosion it ignited are merely past, not over.

She keeps a scrapbook at home, thick with newspaper clippings and the red and white juror’s badge she wore while voting to acquit LAPD Officers Timothy E. Wind, Theodore J. Briseno and Sgt. Stacey C. Koon and to convict Officer Laurence M. Powell.

She sometimes rereads the notes she jotted into two battered spiral-bound pads during the trial, and flips through a sheaf of mail from supporters and critics.

And she has filled 15 neatly labeled videotapes with TV newscasts on the trial, the verdicts, the riots, the rebuilding--anything that might explain it all.

“My husband and my daughter sometimes tell me, ‘There you go again, Mother,’ ‘cause I’m reaching to push the ‘record’ button on the VCR,” she says.

Like other King jurors, Loya suffered a flood of mail, an onslaught of reporters, the fear of attack and the anxiety of having reached the verdict that set Los Angeles ablaze.

But she also suffered through a bout of stress-related pneumonia that left her hospitalized for 10 days and away from her job as a housekeeper at Ventura County Medical Center for two months.

Although she has turned down jurors’ invitations to attend monthly reunions, Loya has talked freely about her experiences to others--friends and family, The Times, even a Thousand Oaks woman whose letters after the trial sparked a pen-pal relationship.

How will the officers’ upcoming federal civil rights trial end?

Powell alone will be found guilty, Loya predicts. “The other ones laid down a lot of swings, and they told us they’re taught that, and it’s allowed to do a lot of swinging,” she says. “But with Powell, it was excessive, and it was just not right.”

Would violence follow another acquittal?

“I didn’t even expect the riot, so I can’t say,” Loya says. “If they (Los Angeles residents) really take some thought and see Powell was the one that did the most, you’d hope they’d settle for Powell being guilty of excessive force.”

Has her life returned to normal?

Pretty much, she says. She is back watching her 13-year-old son play football and readying him for basketball season. She is encouraging her 19-year-old daughter’s studies in criminal justice, and pleading with her 22-year-old daughter to rid herself of a fear of jury duty, so that she can drive and register to vote.

She makes silk flowers, plans to start decorating picture frames as a hobby and is avidly involved in her neighborhood church.

But at night, she and her husband no longer park their cars out front. They have gotten an unlisted phone number and they remain wary of traffic passing outside their home.

And an image remains fixed in her mind: The grainy amateur videotape of King being beaten to the ground.

It sticks, Loya says, because she insisted on watching it over and over and over in deliberations, at fast speeds and slow, trying to reconcile her doubts of some officers’ innocence with other jurors’ desire to acquit them.

Some jurors made fun of her, saying they should just scan the tape.

“I didn’t feel just scanning through someone’s life was fair,” she says, trailing off again.

Two jurors bickered constantly, and others tried to bully her into voting to acquit Powell, she says. Once, she says, she almost walked out.

Stepping onto her small concrete porch, she wonders aloud: When will she be free of it all?

“I guess until the new trial, it won’t end,” Loya says. Her eyes well up. “And even then. . . .”