Former football legend O.J. Simpson was quietly released from a Nevada prison early Sunday morning after serving nine years for a 2007 robbery and kidnapping in Las Vegas involving two sports memorabilia dealers. With his release at 12:08 a.m. on Sunday morning, the Nevada Department of Corrections “pulled off what amounted to a trick play,” notes USA Today. The department had previously said the release would happen no earlier than Monday but prison officials ended up releasing him under under the cover of darkness to avoid media scrutiny.

"We needed to do this to ensure public safety and to avoid any possible incident," Nevada state prisons spokeswoman Brooke Keast said, noting that she didn’t know where he would go next. The Nevada Department of Corrections published an eight-second video on social media where someone is heard telling Simpson to “come on out” and he responds “OK” before walking out into the street. “It was incident free, nobody followed, it was exactly what we’d hoped we could do for public safety,” Keast said. “It was a public safety concern. To make it quiet, under the radar and incident free.”

Simpson, who was sentence to nine-to-33 years in prison, was granted parole in July with officials saying he could be released “on or affecter Oct. 1.” He now faces five years of parole supervision, although that time could be reduced with good behavior.

The 70-year-old Simpson had previously said he wanted to move back to Florida, where he was living before he was convicted of armed robbery in Las Vegas. Two of his four adult children also live in Florida. But Florida’s attorney general said Simpson was not welcome in the state, and the Florida Department of Corrections assured they had not received the necessary documents for him to live there. “The specter of his residing in comfort in Florida should not be an option,” Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “Our state should not become a country club for this convicted criminal.”