The Wrong Man

On the evening of June 17, 1994, when Al Cowlings drove O. J.'s white Bronco fifty miles down I-405 followed by twenty helicopters and God knows how many police cars, I was working in nearby El Segundo, California, at a halfway house for men, debating what to do with the rest of my life. Through the first half of college I had planned to apply to law school, but my parents had gotten me a job at their firm the summer before my junior year, and most of my time was spent in a storage closet searching cases for mention of water rights, which made law school look much less appealing. That fall I took a social work elective on human development and began working with underprivileged children, a job I liked because it suited my nosy nature and gave me the opportunity to tell people what to do. As a lawyer I would be involved in only one side of a case (and a boring one at that, it seemed), with the verdict left in someone else's hands, but as a social worker, I learned, I'd be making actual decisions with consequences that would better people's lives. Plus, I wouldn't have to go to grad school to start practicing. So I switched majors my junior year and started my job a week after graduation.

At the halfway house—Wings of Recovery, which we all called "The Bird"—most of the men were there for low-class felonies like check fraud or drug possession. We had one case of sexual misconduct, involving a seventy-four-year-old psychologist and his twenty-two-year-old patient. (The sex had been consensual, but because of the doctor/patient power differential he was sent to jail; my colleagues and I used to say that he was sent to jail on the charge of it being gross.) I was a case manager—a frontline, entry-level position—and the only woman on staff, so my job included organizing activities like pumpkin-carving parties or pool tournaments and driving the gang in a fifteen-passenger van every Thursday to the grocery, where they could spend their twenty-five-dollar vouchers on the foods of their choice. The Bird had received a funding cut earlier that year, and once a week I had an overnight shift where I spent my time reading client files, learning about Hector Lopez's six-month rotation through fourteen different foster homes as a child, Tim Kosmicki's first run-in with the law at the age of seven for shoplifting, Tyrell Fisher's brief stint as an arsonist thanks to a long-running love affair with meth. I was discovering that there were two types of people in the world: those who would get better and those who wouldn't.

For five days America had been crazy with the news of Nicole Brown Simpson's and Ron Goldman's murders, and already the evidence against her ex-husband was piling up. The men at the house talked about it constantly; the case was shaping up to usurp the place of The Young and the Restless. The show was the one benefit of working the night shift over the day. Whenever new residents moved in, they would make fun of the soap, but within a week they were riveted to the TV, discussing in earnest whether Jill Foster Abbot or Kay Chancellor was in the moral right. The men liked the show because it was one of the few with black characters who weren't portrayed as stereotypical drug dealers and hustlers. The irony of this was something I never pointed out to them.

O. J. was supposed to turn himself in at eleven a.m. on June 17. There were a thousand reporters already circling the police station by ten, but when he didn't show up, things took a turn. That afternoon Robert Kardashian, Kim's father and Simpson's lawyer, read Simpson's suicide note on air, and shortly after that, Juice was spotted in his Bronco, moving at a reasonable [End Page...