Dealer ordered to produce O.J. ring
As O.J. Simpson sits in jail in Nevada, his Pro Football Hall of Fame ring has become the object of a custody battle in California, where a judge ordered Friday that a memorabilia dealer hand it over.
The dealer, Alfred Beardsley, is one of two men Simpson was convicted this month of robbing in a Las Vegas hotel room last year. Attorneys representing Fred Goldman in his effort to collect his share of a $33.5 million wrongful death judgment say they have learned Simpson gave the ring to Beardsley sometime after the robbery.
Following a hearing that lasted no more than five minutes, Superior Court Judge Gerald Rosenberg ordered that Beardsley, 46, appear in his courtroom Nov. 19 and produce the ring. He also ordered Simpson, who is in jail in Las Vegas awaiting sentencing, to not make any effort to dispose of the ring.
But Rosenberg also noted that getting Beardsley to court next month could be problematic. The memorabilia dealer is incarcerated at a state prison in Chino on a parole violation. He was convicted in 2003 of stalking a woman.
“How are you going to get him here?” Rosenberg asked Goldman attorney Peter Haven.
“We’ll make the arrangements,” Haven replied.
Haven is one of two attorneys representing Goldman, the father of Ron Goldman, who was stabbed to death with Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson in Los Angeles in 1994. Simpson was acquitted of those killings but later held liable for the deaths by a civil court jury that ordered him to pay the victims’ survivors $33.5 million.
Dalton, Ga.
Man killed in law firm explosion
A bitter family dispute over property in north Georgia apparently erupted Friday when a 78-year-old man threw an explosive into a law firm that represented his son, causing a blast that killed the father and injured four people in the office.
The explosion blew out windows of the two-story, colonial-style house where attorneys worked, and some in the small blue-collar town of 30,000 felt vibrations from more than a block away.
Authorities identified the bomber as Lloyd Cantrell, a man known around town for wearing bib overalls and carrying a small Chihuahua. Over the years, Cantrell amassed several parcels of land in the area, and gave some of the property to his son.
His son had grown fearful of his father, though, and filed a lawsuit seeking to keep his dad off the property the son had been given, claiming the elder man stole tools, kicked down a door and was suicidal.