Allen Adinoff

I was 16 years old and a sophomore at Southfield [High School]. We were seeing reports of the riots on TV, and nothing looked too bad. A few houses were burning and several folks were running around on the streets. So a few of us figured we would drive down and check it out. We headed down the Lodge freeway and got to around Livernois, and holy [expletive deleted]: the entire city was burning! Then we saw tanks and armored personnel carriers crossing the overpass; shooting was everywhere.

It was then that we realized that this was bigger than we could have imagined, and we had made a horrible mistake. We turned around and drove the wrong direction on the highway to get the hell out of there. Needless to say, there was little traffic.