O.J. Simpson, the onetime football star infamously tried and acquitted of double-murder charges, was cremated on Wednesday during a private gathering of friends and family in downtown Las Vegas, according to the executor of his estate.

Attorney Malcolm LaVergne, who was Simpson’s lawyer for 15 years, said he was among those who attended the morning cremation at the Palm Downtown Mortuary & Cemetery, one week after Simpson died at age 76, following a battle with cancer.

“What I can tell you is that I went there and saw him right before he was placed in” the crematorium, LaVergne told Reuters by phone. “I can tell you other people were there for Mr. Simpson,” he added, declining to disclose who they were except to describe them as relatives and friends.

He said a private “celebration of (Simpson’s) life is being contemplated” for friends and family at a later date. Simpson’s cremated remains “will be in the possession of his children to do with as they see fit, pursuant to his wishes,” LaVergne said.

LaVergne said he was just starting to sort out Simpson’s estate, which he said includes a sum of money of “less than five figures” in a Nevada bank account, household furnishings and golf clubs.

Any outstanding legal judgments against Simpson are next to last in line among any claims that get paid from what remains of his estate after a lengthy list of higher-priority obligations under Nevada law, including the Internal Revenue Service, which ranks No. 5 after administrative costs, funeral expenses, medical bills from his last illness and any alimony and child support, LaVergne said

Simpson had lived in Las Vegas since he was paroled from prison in Nevada in 2017 after serving nine years for his conviction on charges of robbing and kidnapping two sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel in 2007.

Simpson’s greatest notoriety stemmed from his acquittal in a sensational trial 12 years earlier of murder charges in the 1994 stabbing deaths of former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.

Another jury later found him liable for their deaths in a civil lawsuit, and ordered him to pay to pay $33.5 million in damages, most of which has never been collected.

Nicknamed “The Juice,” Simpson was one of the best and most popular athletes of the late 1960s and 1970s. He won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s top player – a running back at the University of Southern California, and went on to a record-setting career in the NFL with the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers.

He later parlayed his football stardom into a career as a sportscaster, advertising pitchman and Hollywood actor in films including the “Naked Gun” series.

-Reuters

America’s OJ Simpson the football star and Hollywood actor who was acquitted of charges he killed his former wife and her friend in a trial that mesmerized the American public but was found liable in a separate civil case, has died. He was 76.

The family announced on Simpson’s official X account that he died Wednesday of prostate cancer. Simpson’s attorney confirmed to TMZ on Thursday that he died in Las Vegas.

Simpson earned fame, fortune and adulation through football and show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.

He had seemed to transcend racial barriers as the star Trojans tailback for college football’s powerful University of Southern California in the late 1960s, as a rental car ad pitchman rushing through airports in the late 1970s, and as the husband of a blond and blue-eyed high school homecoming queen in the 1980s.“I’m not Black, I’m O.J.,” he liked to tell friends.

His “trial of the century” captured America’s attention on live TV. The case sparked debates on race, gender, domestic abuse, celebrity justice and police misconduct.

AP