O j

Tennessee Titans wide  receiver O.J. Murdock died from what appear to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds, according to Tampa, Fla., police. Murdock was found Monday in his car, which was parked outside Middleton High School, his alma mater. The 25-year-old was taken to Tampa General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. “We are shocked and saddened to hear of O.J. Murdock's death this morning,” the Titans said in a statement. “In his brief time here, a number of our players, coaches and staff had grown close to O.J., and this is a difficult time for them.

Hours after sending a gracious yet puzzling middle-of-the-night text message to a former college coach, Tennessee Titans receiver O.J. Murdock died in an apparent suicide, Tampa, Fla., police said. Police spokeswoman Andrea Davis said officers found Murdock about 8:30 a.m. Monday inside his car with what appeared to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The car was parked in front of Middleton High School, where Murdock made a name for himself as a dynamic receiver and state champion sprinter in track and field.

Philip Vannatter, the Los Angeles police detective who led the investigation of the 1994 slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, has died. Vannatter died of complications from cancer Friday in Santa Clarita, his wife, Rita, said. He was 70. "He was a real blue-collar detective," O.J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden said in an emotional interview Sunday. "He did his job the best he could and he was a fine detective, one of the best. " Vannatter was among the first detectives to arrive at former football star Simpson's mansion in June 1994 after the stabbing deaths of Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Goldman.

Will JPMorgan Chase & Co. play its part in makingO.J. Simpson's house into a "Meat Is Murder" museum? That is the question the animal rights group PETA is asking in what must be the most bizarre letter received by the bank Thursday. PETA wrote a letter directly to JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon asking if the bank would donate Simpson's former home in Florida to the group for use as a museum. "Our museum will contain exhibits that give visitors a sense of the terror that animals used for food experience.

O.J. Mayo had talked about being an NBA Hall of Famer going back to his days at USC, so his reaction was predictable last season when he was told he would be coming off the bench. Bench players and the Hall of Fame typically don't go together. "I was definitely mad at first," Mayo said Sunday before he and the Memphis Grizzlies played the Lakers at Staples Center. The shooting guard seemed headed in the wrong direction, going from runner-up to Derrick Rose in rookie-of-the-year voting and averaging 18 points during his first two NBA seasons to second-tier status.

The media coverage on the Casey Anthony murder case drew comparisons to the trials of O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers nearly two decades ago. A look at some coverage and its impact: •Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, truTV, HLN, along with local and other national networks, carried Tuesday's verdict live. •More than 600 press passes were doled out for media coverage, and every major broadcast network has had at least one reporter at the trial. •CNN and NBC built two-story air-conditioned structures across from the courthouse for reporters and crews.

The victories, and a national championship they produced, are vacated. The trophies — a copy of Reggie Bush's Heisman statuette and a crystal football for a Bowl Championship Series title — are now ghosts of Heritage Hall. The forfeiture of those wins and mementos is just a fraction of what USC lost in the wake of some of the harshest penalties in college sports history — delivered largely because the NCAA found numerous violations relating to Bush. The Trojans men's basketball program also was punished for violations related to former star player O.J. Mayo, and the school actually paid some of that in cash: a $5,000 fine and the return of $206,200 it received for participation in the 2008 NCAA tournament.

Juice! A Novel Ishmael Reed Dalkey Archive Press: 336 pp., $14.95 paper Nobody renders the aphorism, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you," more vividly on the page than Ishmael Reed. From the beginning of his career in the '60s to this allegedly post-racial moment, Reed has written dispatch after furious dispatch from the complex milieu in which black Americans have always lived but which their fellow Americans have never been able to fully recognize.

It's telling that the title of Marcia Clark's murder-mystery debut is smaller than her name on the novel's cover. Clark is best known as the lead prosecutor in the media circus known as the O.J. Simpson murder trial. She's less recognized as an author, even though her 1998 book about the case, "Without a Doubt," spent nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Co-writing a book about one of the most notorious trials of the last century "didn't have much leeway. I had a story that had to be told, and the facts were there," Clark said.

For celebrity-obsessed visitors to Los Angeles, it's no longer enough to take a tour of the palatial homes of their favorite stars. As the city's $12-billion-a-year tourism industry rebounds, tour operators are now offering visits to the sites where stars and B-level celebrities have died, dined, fought, committed crimes and thrown headline-grabbing tantrums. Next month, the largest tour operator in Los Angeles, Starline Tours, will team up with the celebrity news source TMZ to create a guided tour that cruises past the sites where TMZ has reported its biggest celebrity scoops.