Rodney King drowned in his swimming pool early Sunday morning.

According to the paramedics who responded to his fiancee’s call, it appeared to have been an accidental drowning.

“Rodney King has a unique spot in both the history of Los Angeles and the LAPD,” Police Chief Charlie Beck said in a statement. “What happened on that cool March night over two decades ago forever changed me and the organization I love. His legacy should not be the struggles and troubles of his personal life but the immensely positive change his existence wrought on this city and its Police Department.”

Beck is right. The LAPD was notorious for its brutality, wholesale bigotry and corruption and it is somehow fitting and just that the cops’ merciless and gratuitous beating of Rodney King, who had already had a difficult life, set in motion a series of events that led ultimately to the long overdue and much-needed reform of the LAPD.

King was a reluctant hero, shy, melancholy, badly bruised by life long before the cops beat him, yet in the two decades that followed, he managed his occasional turns in the spotlight with grace. He did not ask to be a hero, nor did he ever attempt to exploit it, but he is already in the history books, and that’s as it should be.