By Steve Gorman
(Reuters) – OJ Simpson, the former football star infamously tried and acquitted on double murder charges, was cremated on Wednesday at a private gathering of friends and relatives in downtown Las Vegas, according to the executor of his estate.
Attorney Malcolm LaVergne, who was Simpson’s attorney for 15 years, said he was among those who attended the early morning cremation at Palm Downtown Mortuary & Cemetery, a week after Simpson’s death 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 put in the crematorium,” LaVergne told Reuters by phone. “I can tell you that other people were there for Mr. Simpson,” she added, declining to reveal who they were except to describe them as family 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 who will be able to do with them as they see fit, according to his wishes,” LaVergne said.
LaVergne said he was just starting to sort out Simpson’s estate, which he said includes a “less than five-figure” sum of money in a Nevada bank account, home furnishings and golf clubs.
Any pending legal judgment against Simpson is next to last in line among all claims being paid from what remains of his estate after a long list of highest priority obligations under Nevada law, including the Internal Revenue Service , which ranks fifth after administrative ones. costs, funeral expenses, medical bills from his latest illness and any alimony and child support, LaVergne said.
Simpson had been living in Las Vegas since being paroled from a Nevada prison in 2017 after serving nine years for his sentence on charges that he robbed and kidnapped two sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel in 2007.
Simpson’s greatest notoriety came from his acquittal in a sensational trial 12 years earlier on murder charges in the 1994 stabbing deaths of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.
Another jury later found him liable for their deaths in a civil suit and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages, most of which was never 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 the best player in college football, a running back at the University of Southern California, and went on to a record-breaking NFL career with the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers.
He later parlayed his football stardom into a career as a sportscaster, pitchman and Hollywood actor in films including the “Naked Gun” series.