Few people in their right minds would have stayed outside the night the verdicts came down.

On April 29, 1992, a Los Angeles court found four police officers not guilty in the brutal beating of black motorist Rodney King . Within hours, the city was on fire, and it burned for days, becoming a defining moment for black resistance and the long, dark history of race in America.

Los Angeles was primed to erupt. The video of Kings beating compounded months of tension between the police and Angelenos and it sparked a nationwide uproar about racial bias and police brutality that made the story of the riots much more complex than black versus white, looters versus shop owners, or police versus the people.

The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the riots, and for good reason: The reporters and photographers it sent to cover them literally dodged bullets to offer a small window into the chaos.

Twenty-five years later, those journalists have plenty more to tell.

We interviewed three former and current LA Times photographers who braved those violent nights to bring back some of the images that defined a broken city.

Kirk McKoy

The first few hours after the verdicts, Kirk McKoy almost died a few times.

McKoy, who is black, was standing near the intersection of Florence and Normandie which the LA Times dubbed ground zero of the unrest and he didnt feel safe. While the rest of the world was watching white truck driver Reginald Denny get beaten by black men on TV, he was witnessing a free-for-all.

In fact, McKoy has a hard time labeling what he saw as a race riot, or civil disobedience, or an uprising. Within the first two hours, he says, he saw all three. It was mayhem, he said, and nobody was spared.

He saw a fellow photographer a white woman in a very rough African-American neighborhood, McKoy said lying bloodied on the ground after taking a rock to the head. He traded swings in a fistfight with two guys who were trying to steal his camera.

Then he gave up his first canister of film because a man holding a gun to his head didnt like that he was taking photos of the looting.