O.C. Pair First to See Bronco, Call Police

Not only were they in the right place at the right time during the most spectacular manhunt in Southern California history, but Chris Thomas and Kathy Ferrigno managed to remember the right things.

The California Highway Patrol on Saturday credited Thomas, a United Parcel Service worker, and Ferrigno, a San Diego State University student, with providing the first verified sighting of O.J. Simpson and friend Al Cowlings after Simpson had been declared a fugitive.

The Orange County couple were driving to an overnight camping trip at 6:25 p.m. Friday when Ferrigno, of Mission Viejo, glanced out the window of the Toyota Camry they were driving and saw the white Ford Bronco the Hall of Famer was believed to have been riding in.

“Kathy said, ‘Chris! Chris! Chris! there’s a white Bronco,’ ” Thomas said in an interview Saturday, the day the CHP released a copy of the emergency call Thomas placed to authorities Friday evening. “I pulled in behind him and checked the license plate. Sure enough, it was him.”

Thomas, 23, and Ferrigno, 19, followed the Bronco until they saw a call box on the roadside.

During the minute-long telephone call to the CHP dispatch center in Santa Ana, Thomas was clearly excited. As soon as the dispatcher comes on, he blurts out: “I think I just saw O.J. Simpson.” Unlike any of the droves of people who had called law enforcement with “O.J. sightings” during the first several hours of Friday’s historic dragnet, Thomas provided the Bronco’s license plate number--3DHY503. He told the dispatcher the Bronco was headed north on the Santa Ana Freeway, but not before he and Ferrigno got a good look at Cowlings, Simpson’s ex-teammate who was later arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting a fugitive.

“We looked at him, you know, and he like stared us down,” Thomas says with a laugh on the tape of the emergency call.

Ferrigno, who said she is a third cousin to actor-bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno, said Saturday they had made a note of the Bronco’s license plate number as they prepared for their camping trip. They were at Thomas’ house in Lake Forest when a television station indicated that law enforcement, tracing calls made from Simpson’s mobile phone, believed the football hero and Cowlings were in the Lake Forest area.

“It was kind of like, well, let’s just take it down and see what happens,” Ferrigno said. “To actually see it (the Bronco) was unbelievable.”

They actually never saw Simpson, who, it turned out, was lying down in the back seat with a gun to his head. But Cowlings “was very calm,” Ferrigno said. “His window was rolled down, his elbow was hanging out, he was very casual.”

“He gave us a very stern look,” she said. “It was obvious I had recognized him by the look on my face.

“My mouth was hanging open.”

Thomas and Ferrigno never thought twice about notifying authorities, they said. Ferrigno said she was in disbelief when she learned later that people had lined the path of the pursuit to “cheer O.J. on.”

“We were definitely going to do the right thing,” she said. “He was someone wanted for murder.”

Thomas’ and Ferrigno’s sighting, which was immediately broadcast to law enforcement, came six hours after Los Angeles Police Department officials made the shocking announcement that Simpson, 46, had fled the San Fernando Valley home where he was meeting with doctors. An all-points bulletin went out to local and regional law enforcement agencies, U.S. Customs, the Border Patrol and the airlines.

Scores of anonymous calls poured in from across the region, but most were groundless. “We were led astray” by many who had seen white Ford Broncos but failed to note the license plate, CHP communications supervisor Soledad Weaver said. “Theirs was the first verifiable sighting,” Weaver said, referring to Thomas and Ferrigno.

Minutes after Thomas’ phone call, Orange County Sheriff’s Deputy Larry Pool spotted the Bronco on the Santa Ana Freeway. He was joined by Orange County patrol Sgt. James Sewell, more deputies, units from the Santa Ana Police Department and the low-speed, nationally televised pursuit was on.

It wasn’t long after that--6:46 p.m.--that Cowlings, Simpson’s former teammate, placed his own 911 call to the CHP communications center in Santa Ana, pleading with authorities to let Simpson see “his mom.”

“This is A.C.,” Cowlings told the dispatcher. “I have O.J. in the car.

“Right now . . . we’re OK. But you got to tell” the police “to just back off. He’s still alive, but he’s got a gun to his head.

“He just wants to see his mother,” Cowlings said. “Let me get back to the house,” he said, apparently referring to Simpson’s home in Brentwood, where the bizarre, 60-mile pursuit would eventually end peacefully with Simpson’s surrender and his apology to police.

When the dispatcher asked Cowlings if everything was OK, Cowlings said in a calm voice, that it was, but he repeated Simpson’s request to see his mother. “That’s all we ask,” he said.

In an otherwise controlled minute-long phone call, Cowlings only seemed to become exasperated when the dispatcher asked him for his name. He said, “You know who I am, goddammit!”