It will be an unforgettable memory for those who can't help but keep watching. A white Ford Bronco drives steadily down a paved highway in Southern California, with a trail of police cars following close behind.
The passenger was, of course, O.J. Simpson, and the two-hour chase that interrupted regular programming on June 17, 1994, captivated the nation.
“I watched it until it was over. I didn't leave the TV. Who would get off the TV with a chase like that?” Richard Smith, 67, said that day as everything unfolded on his TV in his South Los Angeles apartment. He said he and his family gathered together to watch the event.
From the chase to the criminal trial and the aftermath, Mr. Simpson's story has been followed, discussed and dissected by millions, etched into Los Angeles history and making the city the center of the universe. I pushed it up to where it was.
As news spread Thursday that Mr. Simpson had died from cancer at age 76, many residents couldn't help but recall an apparently personal incident that touched on issues of race and celebrity that have long been familiar to Southern Californians. I no longer get it. And this incident unfolded in their home turf just a few years after the Rodney King assault and the Los Angeles riots.
Mr. Simpson was seen at the time as someone who transcended the tense and dangerous relationships between other Black Angelenos and law enforcement. Overcoming his poor life, he forged an international show business career and lived in the wealthy enclave of Brentwood.
And more than most celebrities, he was a local favorite. It was a rare Angeleno without an OJ sighting, but now he's playing golf in West Los Angeles, now eating Greek food at John Papadakis' Taverna in San Pedro, now on the sand outside his vacation home in Laguna Beach. They are having fun.
Before the murder charges and reports of domestic violence surfaced, Mr. Simpson was an icon, respected as much for his athletic talents as for his commercial success in movies and his role as a spokesperson for the Hertz car rental company.
“It made me want to be better,” said Smith, who still lives in South Los Angeles.
Mr. Smith's neighborhood will soon turn its attention to the trial of Mr. Simpson, who is accused of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman. The trial, which unfolded on live television, lasted 11 months and everyone had their say. “All day, every day, people were stressed and had this argument of, 'He did it, he didn't do it.' So it was going down,” Smith said.
In the process, villains and heroes were created depending on your position, becoming almost caricature-like in a city known for creating dramatic storylines.
A huge tabloid success, the trial was also a central sample of Los Angeles in the early 21st century. Black celebrity defendant surrounded by all-star lawyers. A white Los Angeles police detective accused of racism. A midwestern show business wannabe who lives in a guest house. The Orange County family of the defendant's ex-wife and the victimized relatives of the West Side waiter who was killed along with her. The housekeeper is an immigrant from El Salvador. This judge was the son of a Japanese American who was sent to a concentration camp during World War II.
“Something happened that no one could have believed,” said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, who became a legal celebrity early on by commentating on the Simpson trial on television. She said she still celebrates Passover with the lawyers and reporters she bonded with during the incident.
“Thousands of reporters. Covering every nook and cranny of the network, even interrupting soap operas. Glove demonstrations. Issues of race. Issues of domestic violence. Courtroom cameras still show this to this day. It changed the way the country looked at trials,” Ms. Levenson said.
But what is often forgotten about the riot was the bloodshed that claimed two lives, she said.
Los Angeles has a way of shocking its sets and reinventing itself every few decades, and the city where the Simpson trial took place can be hard to find now. His mansion on North Rockingham Avenue is gone, demolished in foreclosure in 1998 after the Brown and Goldman families won a $33.5 million civil judgment against Mr. Simpson.
Many of those closely involved in his case have long since passed away or moved away from the spotlight. Johnnie Cochran, the charismatic defense attorney who led Simpson's legal “dream team,'' died of brain cancer in 2005. He stopped speaking to Simpson after the trial, and his daughter and ex-wife Robert Kardashian, who later became a reality TV mogul, died of esophageal cancer in 2003.
News of Mr. Simpson's death rippled across Los Angeles Thursday, leaving residents reaching for half-forgotten memories.
So did Sandy Kinder, 72, and her husband David Kinder, 87, who have lived in the Silver Lake area for about 40 years.
The couple remembers being glued to the television, watching the slow chase and saying, “I wonder how it's going to end.”
“It was a very sad time,” Kinder said. “It's very brutal.”
When out-of-town guests wanted to see where Mr. Goldman lived, the Kinders drove to the Brentwood apartment.
“And of course the police swarmed us and told us to get out,” Kinder said.
Patrick-Ian Polk, 50, recalled his early days as a transplant and attending film school at the University of Southern California, where Simpson first rose to national stardom and won the Heisman Trophy.
Mr. Polk arrived from Mississippi in 1992, weeks after riots erupted following the acquittal of a police officer who was seen on video punching Rodney King. Mr. Polk photographed burned-out buildings in South Los Angeles for a class project.
“I mean, it was all this destruction, you know?” he recalled. “I was still a young, hopeful artist and happy to leave Mississippi and live in a big city.”
It was shocking to watch one of the earliest police chases ever shown on television, but it was even more shocking to learn that Mr. Simpson was inside.
“As a black icon, he was obviously very important to the African American community,” said Polk, the filmmaker, who is black. “Now, with the advent of social media and technology, we're used to celebrities falling off their perches,” he says. “It was one of the first times I remember something so infamous happening.”
Los Angeles felt like a place of transition at the time. The acquittal of the white police officer in the King case and the ensuing riots still haunt people today, and many in the city experienced the subsequent Simpson trial through a racially charged lens.
To some, Mr. Simpson's innocence seemed like pure evidence of the power of money. For others, the verdict, obtained with the help of black defense attorneys, was an invaluable symbol of justice.
“When he won, yeah, I was overjoyed, because the police were treating black people and Hispanic people so badly,” said Don Garrett, an actor who has lived in Los Angeles for 40 years. 65 years old) said. “It felt like a victory for black people.”
But Garrett was disappointed in Simpson's actions after the criminal trial. He wrote a book hypothesizing how Mr. Simpson committed the murders and was eventually convicted in 2007 of stealing sports memorabilia at gunpoint with five other men. Ta. He was sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison.
Garrett said the coda evoked no emotional reaction to Simpson's death, just a small wish: “I hope he finds peace.”