O.J. SIMPSON RELEASED FROM NEVADA PRISON

Las Vegas — O.J. Simpson was released from a Nevada prison early Sunday after serving nine years for a 2007 armed robbery and kidnapping in Las Vegas.

The former football star, whose 1995 murder trial in Los Angeles inspired years of debate over race and justice, was released only minutes after he became eligible, a Nevada prison official confirmed.

Simpson left the Lovelock Correctional Center northeast of Reno at 12:08 a.m. in the company of an unidentified driver, said Brooke Keast, a spokeswoman for the Nevada Department of Corrections.

She said prison officials had sought to conduct the release quietly, with as little public and media attention as possible.

Las Vegas — Officials at a remote Nevada prison where O.J. Simpson was set free early Sunday after nine years for armed robbery arranged the former football and Hollywood star's dead-of-night departure to avoid public scrutiny.

It worked. Simpson signed release paperwork just before midnight and disappeared into the darkness minutes into the first day he was eligible for release. Through efforts by prison officials to keep the time and place secret, there were no journalists outside the prison gates to capture the moment.

Though publicity-prone in the past, Simpson apparently took the advice of people in his inner circle that he avoid the spotlight. He was neither heard from nor seen publicly, except when a television news crew found him in a car at a gas station on the way to Las Vegas and he declined to be interviewed.

State Division of Parole and Probation Capt. Shawn Arruti told The Associated Press that the former football hero and celebrity criminal defendant plans to live at a home in the Las Vegas area for the foreseeable future. Arruti declined for what he said were security and privacy reasons to disclose the exact location of the house.

Simpson was released at 12:08 a.m. PDT from Lovelock Correctional Center in northern Nevada, state prisons spokeswoman Brooke Keast told AP. She said she didn't know the name of the driver who met him and took him to an undisclosed location.

Tom Scotto, a Simpson friend who lives in Naples, Fla., said by text message an hour after the release that he was with Simpson.

Along with Simpson's sister and oldest daughter, Scotto had attended the July parole hearing at the same prison where Simpson went after his conviction for a botched 2007 heist at a Las Vegas hotel room — prison time he avoided after his 1995 acquittal in the killings of his ex-wife and her friend.

The 70-year-old Simpson said at the hearing that he wanted to move back to Florida, where he lived for nearly a decade before he was sent to prison in 2008. That return did not appear imminent.