Today In Hip Hop History: Tupac Shakur Was Shot On The Las Vegas Strip 24 Years Ago
On this date in 1996, Tupac Shakur, who’s just left the Mike Tyson vs. Bruce Seldon fight at the MGM Grand Las Vegas, was gunned down in Suge Knight’s BMW while at a stop light at East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane. He was shot four times, with two of the .40 caliber shots landing in his chest. Shakur would succumb to his injuries six days later. He was only 25 years old.
What were the events that transpired the days before the September 7th shooting that caused his early demise and why has the mystery of his death never been solved? These are the questions that remain 24 years later. Chris Carroll, a retired Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department sergeant, told Vegas Seven Magazine in an interview in 2014 that we may never know;
The only real evidence police have are the witness accounts from Outlaw members E.D.I Mean, who claimed to have seen all four men in the vehicle and Yaki Kadafi, who was involved in a scuffle with officers two days following the shooting after they pulled over a driver he was with and he protested. Officers did not try to locate Kadafi, who was later gunned down in the PJs in Irving, NJ two months after the shooting.
Compton investigators assembled mug shots of several gang members, which included Orlando Anderson, the Crip that Tupac attacked in the MGM Grand lobby hours before the shooting. Anderson is the suspect said to have fired the fatal shots that killed Pac. Las Vegas police later discounted Anderson as a suspect and interviewed him only once. He was later killed in an unrelated gang shooting.
Las Vegas homicide Sergeant Kevin Manning said detectives called his lawyer to set up a meeting with a witness, so that the pictures could be reviewed, but according to Manning the calls were not returned. E.D.I. Mean and Frank Alexander, Pac’s body guard, told The Los Angeles Times in early 1997 that they had never been asked by the Las Vegas police to view photos of possible suspects in the case despite having seen the shooting and the faces of the men in the car from which shots were fired at Pac and Suge Knight. Alexander reported seeing the face of the suspect that shot Shakur but he was found dead with a bullet wound to the head in his home in Murrieta, CA on April 28, 2013. It’s being reported that it was suicide and there haven’t been any further updates about Big Frank’s death and who killed him. To this day, Las Vegas police dispute the witness accounts of what they reported to the officers the night of the shooting.