(Aug. 7, 2014) -- Two senior leaders of Cambodia's murderous "Khmer Rouge" regime, complicit in turning the southeast asian country into the "Killing Fields" in the 1970s, have been found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison -- decades after the crimes -- by a tribunal convened by the United Nations and the current Cambodian government. (NewYorkTimes.com coverage here.)

Today, Central Long Beach is home to many refugees and survivors of that criminal regime.

In July 2010, GreaterLongBeach.com's Rachel Powers -- who had been a student at Central LB's Franklin Middle School in the early 1980s -- described how she and her classmates came to learn what some of their classmates from Cambodia had experienced.

LBREPORT.com links below to her story -- "At Franklin School in the Mid '80s, We Learned of Horror and Empathy" -- as originally published on Dave Wielenga's GreaterLongBeach.com just over four years ago at this link.