Two murders in Brentwood? That was unusual, I thought, as word filtered through the newsroom on a Monday afternoon in June 1994 that two people were found dead in the upscale neighborhood — and one of them was Nicole Brown Simpson, the former wife of O.J. Simpson. The other victim was her friend Ron Goldman.
With O.J. Simpson’s death from cancer Wednesday, memories of the saga that consumed the city, my newspaper and — because I lived in Brentwood — my neighborhood came flooding back.
In the newsroom, four days after the bodies were found, reporters and editors clustered around a TV to watch then-Los Angeles Police Cmdr. David J. Gascon announce that there was a warrant for Simpson’s arrest, but he was nowhere to be found. “The Los Angeles Police Department right now is actively searching for Mr. Simpson,” he said. The newsroom erupted into one big cry of “WHOOAAA … !” drowning out what Gascon said after that. It was probably the most dramatic moment I ever witnessed in the newsroom.
My day was a blur from there. As part of the team of Los Angeles Times reporters covering the story, I went to the news conference where Robert Kardashian — Simpson’s friend and lawyer, whose children would grow up to be ridiculously famous — read the letter Simpson left behind before he set out on his infamous odyssey in a white Ford Bronco. It read like a suicide note and was signed “Peace and Love, O.J.” with a little smiley face in the O.