A few years back, I wrote a blog post reminiscing about 911. It’s one of those events that fit into that “where were you when” category. Everybody above the age of 30 remembers where they were and what they were doing when the Twin Towers came down. I’ve had a lot of those events in my life. Several assassinations, a couple of terror attacks, a moon landing, a couple of space missions that ended badly. I was in the Bay Area when the 1989 earthquake happened and I was also in the Bay Area in 1991 when a tornado killed several people not far from where I grew up in Kansas. I remember where I was for some more personal stuff. I remember exactly where I was when my favorite baseball team won the World Series in 1985 and I remember where I was when they won it a second time in 2015.

Absolutely the strangest “where were you when” event in my life was the OJ murder trial verdict. It wasn’t an earth-shattering event like 911 or an earthquake and it wasn’t in any way a day covered in tragedy or glory. It still captured the imagination of the entire country. It was October 3rd, 1995 and I was at work when the verdict came down. I worked at a naval base that was only a few months from closing its doors. The base was already pretty much a ghost town and nearly everyone had been fired, or separated, as the government folks like to say, but I was still there. Since we’d handled nuclear material on the Base, they kept a few of us around to cover several square miles of base property looking for radioactive stuff that might have been misplaced during base activities. As it happens, we actually found some, although that’s a story for another time, or if I ever get hired to write new Twilight Zone episodes. Oh, and it might get me killed if I tell you.

But back to our story. In preparation for the closure, they had closed down every building on the base but one, a cavernous office building that dated back to the late 1800s. It was dark and a bit depressing, but there were only about twenty of us and the building was huge, which meant that I got to have more office space than I’d ever had and ever would have throughout my career. The day of the verdict, someone brought in this ancient device known as a “radio”, a contraption that magically pulled people’s voices out of the air and transmitted them to distant locations like our office cavern. I know many of you are too young to remember such things and sometimes I have to remind myself that you’d have to be over 40 to truly remember anything about the O.J. trial. I was sitting at my desk signing a bunch of reports as the verdict was announced. I wasn’t supposed to be at my desk. I was supposed to be out doing surveys or something, but I made an excuse so that I could hear the verdict and, in my defense, I did have a lot of paperwork to sign. I remember the office got very quiet while the verdict was being read. Then everyone went back to shuffling papers and signing documents. Discussions about the verdict were short, uncomfortable, and uninteresting. Nearly everyone in the cavern thought he was guilty. The majority of us already suspected that he would be acquitted. O.J.’s lawyers were SO good and the District Attorney was SO bad and the judge was SO overmatched. We’d all discussed this before the verdict. After the verdict, there was nothing left to discuss.

That evening at dinner, I had an interesting talk with my 12 year old son. He was the only person I was close to who thought O.J. was innocent and I guess that was the consensus of his classmates as well. Much has been said about how opinions concerning the O.J. verdict broke down along racial lines, but I’ve read almost nothing about how it broke down by age. My son went to a mostly white, somewhat upper to upper-middle class school in the Bay Area and he was convinced that the police had framed O.J. In hindsight, I wonder if that should have been my first indication that the millennial generation was seriously messed up.

With O.J.’s passing, I find myself with mixed feelings about the man. It’s been 30 years since he murdered (allegedly) two people and I remain convinced that he got away with a heinous crime. On the other hand, I watched my father die from prostate cancer and I wouldn’t wish that upon anybody. The saying “Judge not, lest ye be judged” is probably the Bible verse that is most often taken out of context, but it fits this situation perfectly. I have no idea about the health of his soul and, thankfully, it’s not my bailiwick. O.J. is God’s problem now and I’m sure he’ll end up where he deserves to be. I also hurt for his family and the people that loved him.

My heart hurts even more for the victims and their families. Children who lost a mother. People who lost a good friend. It’s been 30 years, but I still remember.