Paul Schmidgall, a junior in physiology from Peoria, said he was in the Student Center shortly after the verdict was announced, when a fight nearly broke out.

One white female was walking by and said, He got away with it.’ Then a black male said, The hell he did. He was just proven innocent.’

Schimdgall said the man acted like he was going to push the girl, but a number of other people stepped in to stop him.

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Schimgdall said the scuffle turned into a dispute of race rather than one of the Simpson case.

Some of the students who witnessed the verdict agree with the jury, while others disagree.

Latasha Randle, a senior in finance from Bowlingbrook, said she agreed with the verdict because the prosecution did not have a strong enough case.

The justice system had too many holes and errors in it, she said. They couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty.

Randle said the case had become more of a race issue than a judicial one.

This is what it boils down to:black and white in the United States, she said. The media has made it a big race issue.

Hamilton Arendsen, a junior in political science from Madison, Wis., said he also believes the jury made the right choice.

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The whole premise of the judicial system is to protect the innocent. They couldn’t prove he did it, he said. Usually when the jury is in that short of deliberation, it usually means that the accused is guilty. But the fact that they couldn’t prove he was guilty made this case different.

But Dezon Morales, a junior in history from Chicago, said he thinks Simpson was guilty.

I think this decision was totally preposterous, he said. This was a total mockery of justice.

This just proves that if you have money and you are a celebrity, you can kill anyone and be found not guilty.

Yimiia Ma, a graduate student in electrical engineering from China, said he also thought Simpson was guilty.

I thought the DNA testing and all of the other evidence was convincing enough to prove him guilty, he said. I think the media played it up too much and may have affected the outcome.

Lieutenant Andrew Smith, field operations commander for SIUC Police, said every day between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m., there are either one, two or three police patrolling the Student Center. But today there were 10 police officers.

Smith said the extra officers were on duty because of potential outbreaks following the announcement of the verdict. He said the police were especially concerned because 33 busloads of children were in the Student Center at the time for an art festival.

We wanted to make sure everything went well, he said. We wanted to be sure there was no conflict.