This July 20, 2017 file photo shows former NFL football star O.J. Simpson at his parole hearing at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Lovelock, Nevada. Simpson was granted parole after more than eight years in prison for a Las Vegas hotel heist. A Nevada prison official said early Sunday, Oct. 1, 2017, O.J. Simpson, the former football legend and Hollywood star, has been released from a Nevada prison in Lovelock after serving nine years for armed robbery. (AP File Photo)
LAS VEGAS, October 1 (AP): Former American football legend O.J. Simpson became a free man Sunday after serving nine years for a botched hotel room heist that brought the conviction and prison time he avoided after his 1995 acquittal in the killings of his ex-wife and her friend.
Simpson was released at 12:08 a.m. PDT from Lovelock Correctional Center in northern Nevada, state prisons spokeswoman Brooke Keast told The Associated Press. She said she didn’t know immediately where Simpson was headed in his first hours of freedom, adding an unidentified driver met him and took him to an undisclosed location.
Keast said the dead-of-night release from the prison 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 from Lovelock.
The 70-year-old Simpson gains his freedom after being granted parole at a hearing in July. Unlike the last time he went free, 22 years ago, he will face restrictions — up to 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 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.
Simpson fell from grace when he was arrested in the slayings, after a famous “slow-speed” 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.
