On This Day, June 17: O.J. Simpson leads police on low-speed chase in white Bronco
On this date in history:
In 1885, the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the United States, arrived in New York Harbor.
In 1967, China announced it successfully tested a hydrogen bomb.
In 1972, the Watergate scandal began with the arrest of five burglars inside Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.
In 1982, Argentina's President Leopoldo Galtieri resigned in response to Britain's victory in the Falkland Islands war.
In 1991, a coroner in Kentucky exhumed the remains of the 12th U.S. president, Zachary Taylor, to prove or disprove rumors he was killed by arsenic poisoning. The testing proved he wasn't.
In 1994, former NFL player O.J. Simpson led California Highway Patrol on a low-speed chase in his white Bronco. The 90-minute televised chase occurred shortly after he was charged for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
In 2011, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon and co-founder of al-Qaida, moved up to assume leadership of the terrorist network six weeks after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden.
In 2015, Dylann Roof killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in a mass shooting. He was sentenced to death in January 2017.
In 2017, the USS Fitzgerald Navy destroyer collided with a container ship in the Pacific off the coast of Japan, killing seven U.S. sailors.
In 2019, Mohamed Morsi, who became Egypt's first democratically elected president shortly after the Arab Spring only to be deposed a year later, fainted and died during his trial on espionage charges.
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed a law formally making Juneteenth a federal holiday, marking the end of slavery in the United States.