Just after midnight on June 13, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson, the ex-wife of football star O.J. Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman were found brutally murdered outside the front door of Brown Simpson’s Brentwood condominium. Within days, Simpson would become the prime suspect in the double murder. When Angelenos woke up on the morning of Friday, June 17, they had no idea their city would become the backdrop to a car chase that would captivate millions around the world.
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To mark the 25th anniversary of Simpson’s two-hour, 75-mile journey across freeways and streets throughout Southern California to evade law enforcement, The Athletic Los Angeles spoke to local athletes, broadcasters and team executives (and one celebrity diehard fan) to give their recollections of one of the most infamous days in the history of L.A.
“I met O.J. on a couple occasions. He came to Laker games, and we would see him sitting there in the front row,” said Byron Scott, shooting guard for the Showtime Lakers from 1984 to 1993. “I remember the last time I saw him: He was sitting next to Marcus Allen, who is a good friend of mine. I never really hung out with him or got a chance to talk with him. But when I was playing a game at the Forum, and I look across and in the front row is O.J. Simpson, even I was like, ‘Wow, that’s the The Juice.’ He was bigger than life.”
“He was not a close personal friend, but I knew him,” said Rick Monday, the Dodgers radio broadcaster who spent his final eight major-league seasons in L.A. (1977 to 1984) and, on an episode of “Superteams,” was even interviewed by Simpson. “I knew him by name, and he knew me by name.”
“I was finishing my junior year at Peninsula High School and we were just about to go into summer,” said Petros Papadakis, captain of the USC football team in 1999 and 2000 and co-host of the “Petros and Money” sports talk radio show on AM 570. “And I’m not sure the exact day, but some time in early May or maybe April (before the murders), they had a huge birthday party at my dad’s restaurant (the Papadakis Tavern, a popular Trojans hangout) in the private rooms where I worked. And it was the birthday party for Tom Kardashian, Robert’s brother, who is really like the patriarch of the Kardashian family. He’s the only one who had any dignity. He’s a man of honor who I grew up serving at the restaurant.
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“So Tom Kardashian had a big party at the restaurant and everybody was fucking there: O.J., Al Cowlings, all the Kardashian kids who were just my age or younger. And I had served O.J. at the restaurant — because O.J. had played with my dad at USC. … Served him and Nicole, and him and Paula Barbieri. So we knew O.J. and thought he was a nice guy just like everyone else. We weren’t in his inner circle. We were restaurant owners.”
“I grew up in the 60s a big fan of O.J. and USC football. I was in junior high school when he won the Heisman Trophy (in 1968),” said Pete Arbogast, USC’s football play-by-play announcer from 1989 to 1995 and from 2000 to the present.
“Later, when I got into the radio business working for KNX, I interviewed him once by accident. I was at UCLA for the women’s Final Four and he and Marcus Allen were there for another event, so I went and sat down between them and got some stuff for my afternoon slot. Other than that, I think I met him one other time at a USC Hall of Fame event they did at the Coliseum in ‘90 or ‘91. He knew who I was because I did the SC games on radio, but we didn’t really know each other. I had no idea what role I would play later when everything went down.”
“At the time of the murders, I was an L.A. County deputy (district attorney) and I was assigned to the hardcore gang division, which was an elite unit with the D.A.’s office, and the only cases we handled were gang-involved murders,” said Allan Walsh, now a superagent in the NHL as co-managing director of Octagon Hockey.
“If there was a gang shooting and the victims lived, it didn’t come to us. We only handled 187s, which were murder cases. And the hardcore gang division was embedded in the D.A.’s office on the 18th floor of the criminal courts building. (Lead prosecutor) Marcia Clark’s office was literally four or five doors down from mine. Bill Hodgman, who was the co-lead prosecutor on the case, happened to be my closest friend at the time and my mentor in the D.A.’s office.
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“Obviously, when the murders happened and the investigation was announced, it was immediately a topic that was running on the news non-stop. I believe CNN was around at the time and was covering this. I remember vividly the press conference with David Gascon in full uniform, who was the LAPD spokesperson, and said O.J. and his lawyers had agreed to surrender earlier in the morning (of June 17, 1994). First, it was 10 a.m., then it was 10:30 a.m., then it was 11 a.m., then it was 11:30 a.m.
“And then I remember the words, ‘The LAPD are actively looking for O.J. Simpson.'”
“I’m typing up the stuff for the show, and then I’m told there’s a chase scene going on involving O.J.,” said Charley Steiner, who’s currently the Dodgers’ radio play-by-play announcer but on that June day in 1994 was anchoring “SportsCenter” for ESPN. “Of course, we’d been covering the story. We didn’t know where the hell he was.
“We had a stationary camera by the news desk, where the editors stood. I was given the task of talking to a camera — not a person behind the camera, just the camera. It might as well have been a camera at an ATM machine. I had to talk about a white Ford Bronco with, we think, O.J. in it.”
“I was playing for the Pacers at the time, and we lost to (the Knicks), so I was at home watching the NBA Finals when it all of a sudden broke out,” Scott said. “They broke coverage and started showing the Bronco truck on the freeway, driving. I got a lot of calls from players around the league because the thing that was really crazy at the time was when I went to Indiana I got a white Bronco. It looked just like the one A.C. Cowlings was driving. So players were calling, asking if it was me, just joking around.”
“Look, everybody remembers where they were, if they were around, and cognizant of what was going on,” said Alexi Lalas, the former Galaxy defender and team president who was with the United States men’s soccer team preparing for its 1994 World Cup opener in Pontiac, Mich. “It is that seminal type of moment: Where were you when this was happening? It was the ultimate reality show unfolding in real time in front of you.
“The whole team was doing this. Everybody was watching it. You would move from the television in the lobby of the hotel, to the television where we were eating, to the television in our room. It was this running show that seemed like it would never end. And yet you couldn’t turn away and you were waiting for that conclusion.”
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“After the press conference, I remember going back to my office and doing some work and then someone said, ‘They found O.J. on the 405,'” Walsh recalled. “And me and several other people left our offices and went back to – it was like the central secretarial pool where the TVs were set up and we watched the beginnings of the chase, of the low-speed chase with the Bronco heading on the 405 South and then turning around and getting on the 405 going north and that’s when the 405 was pretty much cleared. All of the highway patrol and LAPD were on the freeway with a low-speed pursuit going on.
“It was odd. I had never seen anything like that before (the slowness of the chase). I wondered why LAPD cars didn’t just overtake the Bronco and force it to stop. We all hypothesized standing around the TV whether O.J. had a gun and whether he was threatening to kill himself. It certainly was a topic of conversation, but we all were just watching and seeing how it unfolded. No one standing around me had ever seen anything like that before.”
“I remember I was watching it on TV, and I knew where he was. I had been through the area and I had been on the highway where he was,” said Jack Ferreira, general manager of the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim from 1993 to 1998. “These people were out on the overpasses and everybody was looking at him. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing? What is so exciting about this?’
“I remember I called Mike Smith. He was the GM of Winnipeg and we were good friends. I called Mike and I said, ‘Mike, you are not going to believe what I’m doing right now.’ And he says to me on the phone, ‘You’re watching O.J. in the white Bronco.’ I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m doing. Don’t ask me why. But that’s what I’m doing.'”
“We were watching it on a small TV in the clubhouse (in Chicago),” said Tim Salmon, who spent all 14 of his big-league seasons with the Angels, including his 1993 American League Rookie of the Year campaign. “Whatever the case was, everyone was kind of like, ‘Oh, what’s going on?’ Well, it’s L.A., go figure. … It’s just kind of titillating news. It’s just like, ‘Oh man, there’s a murder, and O.J.’s on the run?’ That’s interesting, but you see that all the time in L.A.”
“I was in the studio, making a record, taking great pleasure in my respite from work, and watching basketball,” said Flea, bassist of the legendary L.A. rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers and diehard L.A. sports fan. “And all of a sudden, they started showing a car driving down the highway, and they put the game up in a little corner and made the main screen the car — with the potential that somebody might kill themselves in the car. It was all fucking bullshit. I hated it. I was, ‘Get it off TV! I don’t wanna see it. I don’t care. I’m trying to watch basketball!'”
“We were trying to figure out, ‘Can you get a shot of it?’ Because the cameras were right there,” said Monday, who was calling the Rockies-Dodgers game at Dodger Stadium. “We’re doing a broadcast and we’re watching the game, doing the broadcast, and at the same time, watching the chase. And not only did we know who was in the car, but where they were driving because we were familiar with the landmarks. You’re trying to decipher what’s going on in front of you that’s happening live, and then a number of miles away via helicopter on the television set you’re trying to figure out what’s going on with him.”
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“From a California standpoint, especially those of us who had trained two years in residency down in the Laguna Beach area and in San Juan Capistrano … (you’re) understanding and recognizing all these landmarks,” Lalas said. “It was in our backyard, but it was something the world was paying attention to. So for California people, to see, ‘Oh I know that overpass. I know that exit.’ To have it all unfold when we were up in Pontiac was surreal, to say the least.”
“You’re sitting there literally in shock,” Scott said. “To hear that he was in a Bronco with a gun to his head and A.C. is driving him, it felt like a dream. Or a nightmare. Whichever one. You know what I mean? It really felt like this wasn’t happening. Not one of our sports heroes. … You just couldn’t fathom what was going on.”
“All the talk that he was in the back of the Bronco with a gun and might kill himself and his buddy was driving it — it was riveting television and was suddenly more important than the NBA playoffs,” said Ralph Lawler, the recently retired legendary voice of the Clippers. “It was an amazing television event. It really was.”
“Every overpass they would go underneath, there were people as the route went on that were standing there, and they felt like they knew him also,” Monday said. “He was a popular figure that, whether you had met him or not, you felt like you knew him. At least the persona that had come across on camera, on television, or on the football field.”
“I remember it was a Friday night and it was around dusk, in the summer,” Papadakis said, “and we were all working at the restaurant and we had just opened the doors and we’re all in our aprons and the Greek music going and all that and we had a little TV in my dad’s office and we started watching the chase. And when that fucker went down the 110 South, my dad started screaming that we were going to have to hide O.J. in the walk-in freezer. And he wasn’t kidding. There were a few minutes there where we thought they were going to try and come down to San Pedro and get on a boat.
“My dad wasn’t really that close to them, but they did know of our connections in the harbor. But I don’t know how much I can say about that or who they wanted to call or really any details about it. It was feasible in my mind, as a 17-year-old — and in my father’s mind as a 50-year-old man who owned a very popular restaurant and who knew Al Cowlings and O.J. Simpson — that they were coming to the restaurant when they hit the 110 South. And I’ll never forget that as long as I live. And I’ll never forget my relief as they turned up the 405.”
“I didn’t move to L.A. for another 10 years,” Steiner said. “I didn’t know the 405. I didn’t know Brentwood. I didn’t know anything, except there was O.J. Simpson and his buddy Al Cowlings in the car. That was it. For the next hour and a half, I was like Albert Brooks in ‘Broadcast News’ with the flop sweat. … I don’t know what I said.
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“When they pulled off the 405 and I see all the fans hanging out with their signs and all that. And there’s nobody in my ear. And finally they show up at the house, on Rockingham (Avenue). And I’m thinking, ‘He’s gonna blow his head off.’ And while I am talking and giving plenty of space in between thoughts, I’m thinking to myself: ‘If there is a shooting, what do I say?’ Again, I’d been in the business for a while, but certainly never experienced anything quite like that.”
“Somebody put on Channel 2 (CBS) because Jim Hill got an interview with A.C. Cowlings while he was driving the car,” said Arbogast, who was in the KNX 1070 AM studio doing sports updates when the chase unfolded. “As we were watching we could hear KNX in the background and realized, ‘Oh my god, they’re listening to us on the car radio in the Bronco.’
“I called Mark Hoppe, my lifelong friend and statistician, to ask what we should do. Mark said, ‘O.J. is gonna kill himself. There is no doubt.’ So I asked, ‘Well how can we stop that from happening?’ I mean this was on live television on every channel in the country with millions of people watching. Mark told me that the only person in the world who could talk him out of killing himself was John McKay (Simpson’s old football coach at USC).
“I didn’t have McKay’s number, but I thought I knew someone who might. So I called Nick Pappas, a guy who has been around the SC football program for 50 years. Pappas gave me McKay’s number in Florida but said don’t tell him who you got it from. So I called up McKay and told him the situation and, of course, he was watching the chase on TV. He said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘We want to record you telling O.J. to put the gun down and surrender and play it on the air. We know he will hear it because he’s listening to our show right now.’
“McKay agreed to do it. So I went into a closet just off our traffic center to record it, and then it dawned on me that our traffic people had the technology to patch McKay through directly to O.J. in the car. This was before anyone — you or I — could do a conference call with an iPhone. Somebody must have gotten O.J. or Al Cowlings’ number from Jim Hill and called it. McKay agreed to talk to O.J., but he said only if it would absolutely not be broadcast on the air. So we agreed and patched them through to each other.
“The call lasted about two minutes, and it was very intense. There were five of us in the control room listening: me, my news editor Ronnie Bradford, the assistant news director Ed Boyle, the news director Bob Sims, and I think the traffic reporter was Jim Thornton, who is now the voice of ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ if you can believe that. Anyway, both O.J. and John McKay were crying. McKay said: ‘O.J., I love you buddy. I’ll take care of you and stand with you until the end. Please don’t do this.’ And then there was a long pause. And finally O.J. said, ‘OK, Coach, I won’t do anything stupid. I promise.’ And then Cowlings started to drive back to O.J.’s house. I think it was pretty shortly thereafter that he exited the 405 on Sunset (Boulevard) and went to the house on Rockingham.
“There is no doubt in my mind that McKay stopped O.J. from killing himself in the back of that Bronco. None whatsoever that he saved his life. There’s probably a tape of that conversation somewhere. I don’t have it, but I’m guessing somebody does. To this day, it’s never been heard publicly.”
“I was as much in disbelief watching people on the overpasses,” said Tim Mead, the longtime Angels vice president of communications who was the team’s assistant general manager from 1994 to 1997. “I just didn’t understand that. I was really surprised by that, the curiosity of people.
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“Obviously, it was big news and it was covered. But I remember sitting in my office thinking about human nature in the moment as much as what had happened. Curiosity goes back to how he could’ve gotten away, and you knew he was supposed to turn himself in and then he left and all that. Your mind goes with your different conspiracy theories, but to me, it was just watching people.”
“I just thought it was a pathetic display of American culture at its worst,” Flea said. “Our fascination with celebrities being miserable and sad and fucking up, so we can take them off their pedestals and put them in their place.
“I understand all the deep and social and racial implications of the O.J. case, and how it all went down, and the history of America. The racial injustice in the judicial system. I’m very cognizant of that and I think it’s a profoundly important thing for us to look at and evolve into better things. But I don’t care that someone’s famous. It means nothing to me. And I was watching the game. Couldn’t they have the choice for the people who want to watch the news and want to watch car chases? … I much prefer basketball to the news.”
“The thing that really blew me away was when I watched the ’30 for 30′ on it,” Papadakis said. “And now that I work in TV and I watched (Bob) Costas go back and forth with whoever it was, Tom Brokaw I think, trying to figure out how to deal with the NBA Finals and Bill Clinton’s dancing around in Chicago at the fucking World Cup, and I was just like, ‘Oh my God in heaven.’ That’s when it kind of struck me, the scope of it. Because when I was a kid watching it, it was like, you know, it’s in L.A. … and I see these people all the time.”
“You just had the riots (in 1992 after the Rodney King trial verdict) and all the things that went on with that, so I think you had a little consciousness of it,” Scott said of L.A.’s racial divide. “Just the fact that you had a black man that was accused of killing a white woman, I think the (Simpson) trial brought it to light. There were so many African-Americans out there who wanted O.J. to be freed, and really believed that he was innocent. Then you had all these Caucasian people on the other side that were like, ‘He’s guilty.’ So the racial division was obvious at that particular time.
“The tension at that time in L.A., to be honest with you, even at that particular time, I’m thinking to myself, this is Hollywood. This is a perfect Hollywood murder mystery, going on right here, live, in front of our face. I thought it was almost like the perfect storm, when you start thinking about TV and things of that nature.”
“Every time I hear Brentwood, I think of O.J. and his departed wife who lived nearby,” Lawler said. “And my god, Brentwood just brings all that back.”
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“I followed (the trial) but not extensively,” said Bob Miller, the Kings’ legendary play-by-play announcer from 1973 to 2017. “(When) my mother in-law and father in-law came to visit us, and as we were driving north on the 405, I mentioned, ‘This was where O.J. Simpson was in the white Bronco in that slow chase.’ And my mother in-law asked, ‘Can we go past his house?'”
“You’re talking about one of the biggest stars in the world at that particular time, who was known for what he did on the football field but also known for the Hertz rental car commercials running through the airports (and) also did movies,” Scott said. “He was a big-time star. And because of that, and the gruesomeness of the murders and the pictures, I can still see the Bronco. I can still see Nicole’s body. I can picture all of this, coming back to me. And the person who was involved, I think, is one of the main reasons that it’s probably going to be with us (forever). At least for me in my lifetime, I’m going to remember that Bronco chase, everything that had to do with the O.J. Simpson trial.
“I will never forget it.”
Fabian Ardaya, Vinny Bonsignore, Jovan Buha, Josh Cooper, Lisa Dillman, Andy Kamenetzky, Brian Kamenetzky, Pedro Moura and Eric Stephens contributed to this report.
Top photo: Joseph Villarin / AP Photo
