OJ Simpson Dead
Apr 11, 2024
"LAS VEGAS -- O.J. Simpson, the decorated football superstar and Hollywood actor who was acquitted of charges he killed his former wife and her friend but later was found liable in a separate civil trial, has died. He was 76.
The family announced on Simpson's official X account that Simpson died Wednesday after battling prostate cancer. He died in Las Vegas, officials there said Thursday.
"On April 10th, our father, Orenthal Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren. During this time of transition, his family asks that you please respect their wishes for privacy and grace," the family posted on Simpson's X account.
Simpson earned fame, fortune and adulation through football and show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife slayings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.
On June 12, the bodies of Brown Simpson and Goldman were found outside her condo in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles. Simpson was a person of interest in the murders, but rather than turn himself in five days later, he led police on a low-speed chase throughout Los Angeles as a passenger in a white Ford Bronco driven by former NFL player Al Cowlings. An estimated television audience of 95 million watched the drama unfold, with live coverage interrupting regular programming, including the NBA Finals.
David Cook, an attorney who has been seeking since 2008 to collect the civil judgment in the Ron Goldman case, said he spoke with Fred Goldman, father of Ron, on Thursday about Simpson's death. Cook declined to say what Fred Goldman said or where he was, but Goldman told NBC News that Simpson's death is "just further reminder of Ron being gone all these years. It's no great loss to the world."
"He died without penance," Cook said of Simpson. "We don't know what he has, where it is or who is in control. We will pick up where we are and keep going with it."
He married his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, on June 24, 1967, moving her to Los Angeles the next day so he could begin preparing for his first season with USC -- which, in large part because of Simpson, won that year's national championship.
Simpson won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. He accepted the statue on the same day that his first child, Arnelle, was born.
He also had two other children, Jason and Aaren, with his first wife. Their daughter Aaren drowned as a toddler in a swimming pool accident in 1979, the same year Simpson and Whitley divorced.
Simpson and Brown were married in 1985. They had two children, Sydney and Justin, and divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered.
"We don't need to go back and relive the worst day of our lives," he told the AP 25 years after the double slayings. "The subject of the moment is the subject I will never revisit again. My family and I have moved on to what we call the 'no negative zone.' We focus on the positives.""
The Associated Press
