Simpson Recalls Returning From Chicago With Only One Cut
SANTA MONICA, Nov. 25 (Noon) -- O.J. Simpson faced a caustic and hostile examination about cuts on his left hand and blood drops left at his house, as he testified Monday morning in his civil trial.
Plaintiffs' attorney Daniel Petrocelli, at times sarcastic, at times incredulous, pointedly asked Simpson to explain how he received a number of different cuts and scratches on his left hand. Simpson maintained that he had only one cut on his hand when he returned from Chicago, but photos taken by Dr. Robert Huizenga, who examined him two days later, show three cuts and seven abrasions. Simpson testified that he could not remember how he got the other cuts on his hand.
Petrocelli's examination was not friendly.
"Where did you get that fingernail gouge?" Petrocelli asked Simpson, about a small mark on his left hand. Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki sustained a defense objection to the question.
But earlier in his testimony, Simpson implied that some of the injuries on his hand could have been fingernail marks -- from his young son Justin.
Referring to a cut on Simpson's hand, displayed on a photograph, Petrocelli asked, "It was someone's fingernail ripping into you're skin, right?"
"Unless it was Justin's, no," Simpson replied. He added that he was not saying the cut was a fingernail mark, but that he had wrestled with his son after the murders and might have received a mark.
Throughout his testimony Monday, Simpson maintained that he did not know how he cut his hand -- either at Rockingham or in his Chicago hotel room. Before he left for the airport, Simpson said, he "assumed" his hand was cut because he saw blood on the sink and on his pinkie finger. And Simpson testified that he cut his hand on a broken glass in his hotel room, but could not remember exactly how.
"I sustained that injury . . . when I was cleaning the glass, trying to get it into the sink, that's where I got that injury."
Petrocelli also focused his questions on how Simpson's blood ended up his Bronco. Simpson told the jury that he went to the Bronco right before he went to the airport in order to grab his cellular phone accessories and a windbreaker, but didn't notice that he was bleeding. Petrocelli suggested that the right-handed Simpson would have reached into the Bronco with his right hand -- which did not square with having blood from his left hand in the car.
"You have no explanation for how DNA matching your DNA was found in that Bronco, correct?" Petrocelli asked.
"That's correct," Simpson said.
"And you have no explanation for how the blood of Nicole ended up on the driver's side carpet?"
"No," Simpson replied.
"You have no explanation for Ron Goldman's blood was found in that car?" Petrocelli asked.
"No," Simpson replied.
Outside the courthouse, the crowds shouted at Simpson as he arrived for the morning session, and as he left for lunch. The football hero's supporters and detractors each tried to drown the other out. Screams of "Murder," and "Butcher," competed with a chant of: "O.J., O.J., O.J."
-Robert Schmidt
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