Eight-grader Anthony Manor watched Las Vegas shopping center go up in flames

Anthony Manor was 12 years old and living in a public housing complex with his parents and 10 brothers and sisters. The family's home was directly behind the Nucleus Plaza shopping center that was targeted by rioters.

"We sat on our front porch and watched the whole thing go up in flames," Manor, now 32, said.

As a child, he only partially understood what was happening and why. The violence wasn't so different for the neighborhood known at the time for its entrenched street gangs.

"We lived by a different code," he said. "You were living in a war zone already. It's just now they were setting stuff on fire."

When things calmed down, he and others went to investigate the charred remains of a grocery store. They found coins from a slot machine that was destroyed by the fire.

"Everybody had burned quarters," he said.

Manor and his family were more disturbed at having their neighborhood cordoned off by police than they were by the damage. They felt trapped.

"They blocked us all into the Westside," he said. "There was a curfew. You could not leave."

It felt like the world was at war with his neighborhood.

"I remember being outside and it was like 9 or 10 at night and there was an actual tank" rolling down the street, Manor said. "We had never seen anything like it. It didn't feel like we were in America."

The power remained out for days, he said.

"Everybody was barbecuing" outside, he said. "People didn't go to work. We didn't go to school" the following Monday.

Manor has since moved to northwest Las Vegas and works as a liaison for Clark County Commissioner Lawrence Weekly. But he still thinks of West Las Vegas, where his family lived for generations, as home.

As an adult, his perspective on the riots has matured. Like many fellow West Las Vegans interviewed at the time, Manor said what happened to Rodney King was wrong, but the violent reaction among some community members wasn't right.

"If people feel so deeply about what is wrong and they need some justice, they need to be down at the City Council or County Commission meetings and holding people accountable," he said. "I look back and think, 'You burned down your own community and put yourselves in harm's way for something that happened in California.'"

Manor believes in peacefully protesting injustice, not "damaging your own undeveloped neighborhood - the one thing you had to hold on to - to the point where it's never been the same."

But a lot has changed since that night that makes such rioting less likely to occur again, he said.

"People got into office who looked like" people from the community, he said. "There's more community policing. People started to understand government and became more civic-minded."

Contact reporter Lynnette Curtis at lcurtis@reviewjournal.com.