O.J. Simpson’s death brings back memories of my year as the ‘O.J. editor’ | Opinion

One thing I’ll never forget about the O.J. Simspon trial was the collective audible gasp in the newsroom when he was acquitted in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.

I think I was the only one there who wasn’t completely astonished when the verdict was announced. I’d been watching the case unfold for months and, on the evidence presented, I thought it could go either way.

That was 28 years ago, and today, after the news that Orenthal James Simpson, 76, has died of cancer, all those memories are rushing back to me

His trial consumed the better part of a year of my life.

I was city editor of the Pasadena Star-News — and the designated O.J. editor for the entire Thomson Newspaper chain, an international conglomerate that then had about 130 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada.

My routine for most of 1995 was this: In the morning, I turned on my desktop TV to watch the “Trial of the Century” and in the evening, I’d edit all the stories that our reporters produced that day. Then I’d watch as much TV news coverage as I could to see if we’d missed anything.

Adding to my daily stress level was the fact that the judge in the trial, Lance Ito, lived in Pasadena and was one of our subscribers. He referenced our coverage several times from the bench, sometimes complimentary and sometimes critical.

To this day, it’s the most sustained strain I ever had to deal with as a journalist. I’ve reported and edited many major stories, but never one where the news just kept breaking, day after day, month after month.

For those too young to remember, it’s probably difficult to comprehend how the trial captivated America’s attention for so long.

Known as “The Juice,” Simpson was one of the greatest football running backs to ever play the game. A Heisman Trophy winner who set the college football rushing record, he went on to a brilliant Hall of Fame career in the NFL, again shattering records and amassing more than 14,000 all-purpose yards in an 11-year career, mostly with the Buffalo Bills.

His naturally affable public persona made him a star off the field as well, in movies, sports broadcasting and advertising, most notably his classic ads for Hertz Rent-A-Car, running through airports to catch a plane.

When the murders happened, it became a classic tale of a legendary hero become arch villain.

But it was more than that. All along, it was tinged with subplots of sex, race and class divisions and how the police were doing their job. It laid bare elements of L.A. — and American — life that everybody knew about, but seldom talked about.

On the day of the verdict, I had little time to contemplate those ramifications, because I was way too busy racing to put out an extra edition.

We’d worked on the extra for weeks, creating a comprehensive record of the murder, Simpson’s capture after a slow-speed chase on the California freeways, and turning points of the trial.

The day of, we added a hastily written verdict story, slapped on the banner headline “NOT GUILTY,” and I hit the button to send it to the press.

Back then, the Internet was in its infancy, unlike now when news is a few smartphone taps away. Our goal was to be the first newspaper on the street, and we made it.

Our publisher even offered a $100 bonus to the delivery driver who could get it to the downtown courthouse first.

The first copies got there about an hour after the verdict was read, and it was immensely satisfying to see TV talking heads waving our paper on camera.

Looking around the web today, I found an L.A. Times photo essay featuring a picture of a Black man holding our Extra over his head at the courthouse celebrating the verdict.

That photo illustrated the simmering racial divide over Simpson’s guilt or innocence. And nowhere was it more pronounced than in Pasadena.

Pasadena is and always has been a community divided by race.

A freeway runs through it and south of that barrier, it’s the old white-shoes money city you see every year in the Rose Parade. North of the freeway is one of Southern California’s oldest historically Black communities.

By and large, white Pasadenans were astonished that O.J. walked after all the mountain of evidence that was presented against him.

Black Pasadenans were much more sympathetic to defense arguments that racist cops within the LAPD had planted evidence to frame Simpson.

My final take is that they’re both probably right.

O.J. very probably did do it. And the LAPD very probably did plant evidence to try to bolster the case.

I guess that’s why I wasn’t surprised by the verdict. And why I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had gone the other way.

Mostly, I was just glad it was over.