Perhaps the most innocent of all the innocent victims of the 1992 Los Angeles riots was Elvira Evers and the baby inside her womb.
Elvira was seven and a half months pregnant when her Compton neighborhood was taken over by rioters and looters, NBC reports.
On April 30, 1992, she was on the street, waiting for her eldest son to come home. When her five-year-old daughter came over to her, the mother pushed her daughter away to safety.
“I started getting nervous,” she said.
A minute later, she felt a burning sensation, she said. When she looked down, she realized she had been shot in her stomach.
Because of the mayhem in the streets, it would have taken 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive so a friend drove Elvira to St. Francis Medical Center.
It was a week before Elvira opened her eyes. She had had an emergency caesarian section, and, when she awoke, she started crying. She thought she had lost her baby.
To her amazement, a nurse came up and showed Elvira a picture of her baby, Jessica.
Twenty years later, Elvira shared the terrifying experience with her grown daughter. In the video above, Jessica is brought to tears by the original news coverage of her mother being shot.
Jessica said she knows she was spared for a reason, and she’s trying to figure out that reason. “As each day goes by, I try to find something… that I’m here for,” she said.