Simpson’s Former In-Laws Agree to Let Children Stay With Him

Ending a five-year custody battle, O.J. Simpson and his former in-laws have agreed that his two children will move with the former football star to Florida next month, officials said Saturday.

“This settles all issues regarding custody,” said Marjorie Fuller, the court-appointed attorney who represents the children. “There will be no more need for trials regarding the issue of where the children will go.”

Juditha Brown, the mother of Simpson’s slain ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, signed the agreement giving Simpson physical custody of the children but will retain legal guardianship, according to Brown family friend Jonathan Burrington.

The deal comes three years after an Orange County judge granted Simpson custody of the children. But an appeals court in 1998 threw out the lower-court ruling, saying the judge wrongly barred evidence suggesting that Simpson beat and later murdered his ex-wife.

A second custody trial was being planned before the settlement was worked out.

Under the agreement, the children--Sydney, 14, and Justin, 12,--will continue to visit the Brown family in Dana Point during the summer and on some holidays, Burrington said.

He added that Juditha Brown was prompted to drop the custody fight at the urging of the children, who asked her to let them stay with their father.

“Judy and [her husband] Lou are very forgiving people,” he said. “Their No. 1 interest is the children, and not making war. They want the children to be as happy as they can be.”

The children have been living primarily with Simpson for the last three years, and legal experts said that bond would make it unlikely that a court would grant custody to the grandparents.

The settlement appears to have been in the works for some time. Last year, Simpson’s attorneys announced on television that the two sides had reached an agreement that would give him custody. But the Brown family at the time denied it.

The custody agreement closes another chapter in the long Simpson legal saga.

Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, were knifed to death outside her Brentwood home June 12, 1994, as the Simpson children slept inside. Simpson was arrested after a low-speed freeway chase.

In 1995, jurors in a criminal trial acquitted the former football star of murdering his wife, but jurors in a subsequent civil case awarded the victims’ families $33.5 million in damages.

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Times staff writer Ann Conway contributed to this report.