Keith Zlomsowitch was driving in to Dorrian's Red Hand, the West Palm Beach, Florida, restaurant in which he's a partner, when he found out that O.J. Simpson has been granted parole in Nevada.
And while Zlomsowitch, who dated Simpson's ex-wife Nicole off and on a few years before her 1994 murder and testified before the grand jury when the former Hall of Fame football player was accused of the crime, was "hopefully optimistic" that Simpson would not be granted parole; he was not surprised that he was.
"I knew it in my heart," said the veteran restaurateur, 56, who relocated to Jupiter a little over a year ago.
Simpson, who was acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in 1995, is scheduled to leave the Lovelock Correctional Center this fall after the Nevada parole board voted unanimously Thursday to grant him parole in his 2008 conviction on charges including kidnapping and armed robbery.
Simpson, who lived in Kendall after he was acquitted of the murder charges, told the parole board Thursday he hopes to return to Florida once he gets out of prison.
Zlomsowitch, who appeared in the Academy Award-winning ESPN documentary “O.J.: Made In America,” met Brown Simpson in Aspen, Co., in 1992, where she’d fled “to get away from (her husband),” he said. At the time he operated three locations of the restaurant Mezzaluna. Brown Simpson had dined at the Brentwood, Calif., version the night she died; Ron Goldman, who died with her and had brought her the sunglasses she had left there, “was one of my employees.”
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After the murders, Zlomsowitch testified before a grand jury about a troubled history with Simpson during the time he and Nicole dated, which he said included stalking, spying on the couple during an intimate moment, kicking the door down and threatening them both. So he said he was dumbfounded when Simpson, who had a documented history of physically abusing Nicole, described himself in the hearing as never having been confrontational.
“I don’t know,” he deadpanned. “Is domestic violence not confrontational? Is beating your wife or stalking not confrontational?”
Simpson had originally been sentenced to 33 years; he was granted parole on the armed robbery charges in 2013, automatically reducing his sentence and making him eligible for parole this summer.
Zlomsowitch said he watched the hearing at home, and although “I’m almost numb” to issues regarding Simpson, he said he wasn’t pleased with the “atmosphere” of the hearing itself, “which was so jovial. The head of the parole board was starstruck.”
And while Simpson’s release follows the guidelines for the charges he faced in Nevada, Zlomsowitch said this and the murder of his friend will always be inextricably linked,
“It’s not a different case for me,” he said. “You can’t disentangle them.”
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