AFTER THE RIOTS: THE SEARCH FOR ANSWERS : Mob’s Racial Mistake Jeopardizes Motorist : Escape: Crowd attacks light-skinned man in his vehicle despite his insistence he’s not white. An immigrant woman from Belize helps rescue him.

Skin color was the last thing on Byron Bowers’ mind as he drove home from work along Florence Avenue a week ago Wednesday evening.

When he heard the shouts--”He’s white! He’s white! Kill him!”--Bowers looked around to see who the mob was pointing out.

The adopted son of dark-skinned African-Americans, Bowers attended an all-black elementary school, attends a predominantly black church, and grew up with an ingrained sense of black pride. He never doubted where he fit in to the “us-vs.-them” sentiments that had gripped this neighborhood near Inglewood, his neighborhood for all of his 19 years.

Then a barrage of rocks shattered his windshield.

“I’m not white! I’m half-black!” Bowers shouted, as 25 or 30 young men stormed into the intersection and swarmed over his car. A fist smashed into his jaw. Men beat his white Jeep Wrangler with crowbars.

“I’m black!” yelled Bowers, soft-spoken, with black hair, a black beard, and freckles spanning the dark beige skin of his broad nose.

A muscular young man in a football jersey leaped onto the hood and kicked at the crystallized windshield. Hands clawed at him, trying to haul him into the street.

Then a woman latched onto the driver’s side window. In her bloodshot eyes Bowers saw pure terror. “Don’t kill him!” she yelled to the crowd. And to him, she screamed, “Just drive!”

On Wednesday, a week later, Bowers sat in the living room of his parents’ two-story stucco home, running the attack over and over on a television set with the touch of a remote control. Someone, it seems, videotaped the incident, and Tuesday it was shown on KABC.

“The driver of this Jeep is very lucky . . .” reporter Linda Breakstone narrates as the screen shows Bowers’ car lurching down the street with the woman who came to his rescue clinging to the window. “ . . . He escapes.”

A 24-year-old immigrant from Belize, the woman had seen live coverage of the bloodier and now infamous attack on cement truck driver Reginald Denny on the same corner, and rushed out to help. She had already jumped onto the back of a man who was stoning a car carrying a Hispanic couple and baby. She had fended off a little boy who was punching a white woman, and had gotten a black eye trying to wrest weapons from people in the crowd, all before coming to Bowers’ rescue.

Afraid to drop his savior off in the growing pandemonium, Bowers took her to his nearby home in the Morningside Park, where his parents have lived for 28 years. She spent the night there and returned to her neighborhood the next morning.

Within days, the Bowers’ pleasant, middle-class neighborhood was again tranquil. Birds chirped in the palms and jacarandas. People had found time to mow the neat lawns and tend the flowers.

In contrast, the two main streets framing the neighborhood, Florence Avenue and Manchester Boulevard, are pocked with burned-out businesses. The graffiti spray-painted almost everywhere reflects the racially charged tenor of the past week: “Black Power . . . Black is Back . . . What up, black man?” Bowers had always been sympathetic to what such slogans meant.

And before last week, he had always felt comfortable with his identity. He learned to get along with people of every race when he was bused to Palos Verdes High School. When he did experience hatred, it was in the racism of whites against blacks.

“The paperwork at school always listed me as black,” said Bowers.

“When someone asked, I always said I was black. Only recently did I really realize I am half-white and half-black.”

His perspective was shattered the moment those rocks hit his windshield.

“They seemed to think it was OK, because that’s how they were brought up,” Bowers said of the rioters. “Their only contact with whites is with the cops who beat them up, or when they go into white neighborhoods and get stared at.”

As Bowers pondered the implications of the attack, his mother, Mozell, puttered in the kitchen.

His father, Calvin, who teaches interracial communications at Pepperdine University, was also home, getting ready for the funeral of an 18-year-old man, a member of the family’s church, who was killed by a bullet during the riots.

In the dining room, a big bookcase overflows with family photographs and books of every description, including a healthy selection of the African-American and other racially oriented literature Bowers read as a boy: “The Black Power Imperative,” by Theodore Cross, “Cry the Beloved Country,” by Alan Paton, “The Nature of Prejudice,” by Gordon Allport.

Bowers, who is studying history and creative writing at a community college and works part time at a copy center, would probably have headed up to Parker Center himself to protest the Rodney King verdict--peacefully--if fate hadn’t intervened, he said.

He can almost put himself in the shoes of the people who unleashed their anger based on the color of peoples’ skin. Almost .

“There’s a certain point at which people cease to be the victims of society and become the victims of their own stupidity,” he said. “If you can’t ask yourself if what you’re doing is right or wrong . . . if you just go along with the crowd, you keep yourself in a small and limited world.”

And those limited views lead to prejudice, hatred and cloudy judgment, he said.

“That applies to the police, it applies to the members of the (King) jury, who didn’t stand up and refuse to go along with the crowd--it applies to anyone who refuses to think for themselves.”