Former football legend O.J. Simpson became a free man again Sunday after serving nine years for a botched hotel-room heist in Las Vegas that brought the conviction and prison time he avoided in the killings of his wife and her friend after his 1995 acquittal.
Nevada state prisons spokeswoman Brooke Keast told The Associated Press that Simpson was released at 12:08 a.m. PDT from Lovelock Correctional Center in northern Nevada. She said she did not know who met Simpson upon his release and didn’t know where Simpson was immediately headed in his first hours of freedom.
“I don’t have any information on where he’s going,” said Keast, adding she had no indication where he was immediately Sunday.
Keast said, the dead-of-night release from the prsion located about 90 miles (145 kilometers) east of Reno, Nevada, was conducted to avoid media attention.
“We needed to do this to ensure public safety and to avoid any possible incident,” Keast added, speaking by telephone.
The 70-year-old Simpson gains his freedom after being granted parole earlier this year. Unlike the last time he went free 22 years ago, he will face restrictions — five years of parole supervision — and he’s unlikely to escape public scrutiny as the man who morphed from charismatic football hero, movie star and TV personality into suspected killer and convicted armed robber.
Simpson is looking forward to reuniting with his family, eating a steak and some seafood and moving back to Florida, his lawyer said recently.
Simpson also plans to get an iPhone and get reacquainted with technology that was in its infancy when he was sent to prison in 2008.
The Florida Department of Corrections, however, said officials had not received a transfer request or required documents, and the attorney general said the state didn’t want him.
“The specter of his residing in comfort in Florida should not be an option,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said. “Our state should not become a country club for this convicted criminal.”
Close friend Tom Scotto, who lives in Naples, Florida, has offered to have Simpson live at his house, but he has not responded to messages from The Associated Press in recent days about whether a plan was finalized. Simpson lost his home near Miami to foreclosure in 2012.
Two of Simpson’s children, Justin and Sydney, also live in Florida.
He could live at least temporarily in Las Vegas, where a friend let Simpson use his home for five weeks during his robbery trial.
His five years of parole supervision could be reduced with credits for good behavior.
It’s a new chapter for the one-time pop culture phenomenon whose fame was once again on display when the major TV networks carried his July parole hearing live.
He told officials that leading a group of men into a 2007 armed confrontation was an error in judgment he would not repeat.
He told the parole board that he led a “conflict-free life,” an assertion that angered many who believe he got away with killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles in 1994.
Simpson was once an electrifying running back dubbed “Juice” who won the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s best college football player for USC in 1968 and became one of the NFL’s all-time greats with the Buffalo Bills.
Handsome and charming, he also provided commentary on “Monday Night Football,” became the face of Hertz rental-car commercials and built a movie career with roles in the “Naked Gun” comedies and other films.
Simpson fell from grace when he was arrested in the slayings, coming after the famous Ford Bronco chase on California freeways. His subsequent trial became a live-TV sensation that fascinated viewers with its testimony about a bloody glove that didn’t fit and unleashed furious debate over race, police and celebrity justice.
A jury swiftly acquitted him, but two years later, Simpson was found liable in civil court for the killings and ordered to pay $33.5 million to survivors, including his children and Goldman’s family.
He is still on the hook for the judgment, which now amounts to about $65 million, according to a Goldman family lawyer.
On Sept. 16, 2007, he led five men he barely knew to the Palace Station casino in Las Vegas in an effort to retrieve items that Simpson insisted were stolen after his acquittal in the 1994 slayings. Two of the men with Simpson in Las Vegas carried handguns, although Simpson still insists he never knew anyone was armed. He says he only wanted to retrieve personal items, mementoes and family photos.
He went to prison in 2008, receiving a stiff sentence that his lawyers said was unfair.
If the nation’s Simpson obsession waned for a while, it seriously resurged last year with the Emmy-winning FX miniseries, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” and the Oscar-winning documentary “O.J.: Made in America.”
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