The Killing of Tupac Shakur (29 page)

After Tupac’s death, Afeni arranged to meet with Suge to settle her son’s estate, she said during the same “Prime Time Live” interview.

“I kept telling Rick [Fischbein], ‘We’re just going to—we’ll meet with Suge. He’ll tell you everything. We’ll meet with him first.’ But he didn’t even show up.”

In December 1996, Afeni filed an infringement lawsuit against Death Row Records for selling hats, T-shirts, and sweatshirts connected with Tupac without her permission. After the lawsuit was filed, Death Row and two companies that made and distributed the merchandise agreed during a hearing in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to a sales moratorium. They also promised to deposit potential royalties in a court-monitored account—more than a half-million dollars total.

Also, three record producers in March 1997 agreed to delay the release of an album containing two early recordings by Tupac. The move came as a federal judge in Sacramento, California, was to rule on a restraining order requested by Afeni Shakur’s estate attorney. The three Sacramento-area producers were accused in court documents of “intentionally infringing upon [Tupac’s] valuable trademark and publicity rights.” The complaint continued, “... [the trio is] profiting from their illicit conversion of songs that he authored and performed in or about 1990, before he became famous, and which belong to Shakur’s estate ... [The producer’s actions] are especially predatory and harmful at this critical point in time, when Shakur’s recordings and film appearances are receiving widespread, critical acceptance before a mainstream audience.”

Celeste Chulsa, Fischbein’s assistant, told me in a telephone interview from New York City that Afeni had also sought rights to previously unseen home videotape of Tupac that was reproduced in the biographical film,
Thug Immortal.
The movie stayed on the
Billboard
top-20 list for several weeks after its release.

Conversely, in February 2002, Frank Alexander’s documentary,
Before I Wake
, which made Amazon.com’s top seller list, was welcomed by Tupac’s mother. “She called me and we both cried on the phone. I have her blessings,” Frank said.

Earlier, Afeni had accused Death Row of not giving her any money from her son’s estate since his death. She told “Prime Time Live” that Suge had told her at the hospital at her son’s deathbed that he would take care of her and her family. When asked if Suge Knight had done that, Afeni answered, “No.”

Suge, however, told reporter Lena Nozizwe with Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” that Afeni was, in fact, paid. “When I was in jail, I gave her a check for $3 million,” Suge said. “Plus ... I think in four or five months Tupac spent $2.4 million, $2.5 million.”

Afeni contended that the $3 million had come from lnterscope, not from Suge like he’d promised her.

Besides the money, she said the masters of the 200 unreleased songs Tupac had recorded were missing. “We don’t know where the masters are, because we can’t get an accounting from Death Row Records,” she said.

Suge’s long-time attorney, David Kenner, echoed Suge’s comments that Death Row had made numerous advances to Tupac and that all of his money had been properly accounted for and paid in a timely manner.

Suge responded to Mrs. Shakur’s accusations during his final appearance in court. “I’m not mad, but I’m disappointed at Tupac’s mother,” Suge said during his sentencing speech. “People tell her that the songs I paid for and marketed is her songs. And she made statements saying that he never got any money. I got signed documents where he received over $2.5 million, even before he was supposed to receive money. And beyond all that, when he was incarcerated, I gave his mother $3 million. But when the media gets it, it turns around
that I left him for dead, I left him with zero, and that I’m this monster.”

“If I was so bad I would have no success,” Suge told “Prime Time Live.” “I know business. I know how to take my artists and give them superstar status, and [let] them get what they deserve.”

Death Row Records countersued after Afeni filed suit against the record company. Death Row claimed Tupac’s estate owed the record company $7 million for advances and expenses paid out to Tupac.

Attorney Rick Fischbein, who at the time I spoke with him was in the middle of negotiating a settlement for Tupac’s mother with Death Row Records, said a sizable settlement was “imminent.”

“We’re close to a settlement,” Fischbein said in July 1997. “It’s a substantial settlement, if it happens. We’re certainly all working to try to settle it.”

Fischbein also indicated that Death Row had complied with providing an accounting, and that the settlement would not be one lump sum, but a percentage of future sales of Tupac’s works. “We now have an accounting,” Fischbein said. “What’s being discussed is not just a single payment. Music is odd in that it doesn’t really matter who owns it. The real question is, who gets the money for releasing it or playing it? Owning it is an interesting issue, and it might lead you to get those other rights, but those rights could be separate. These issues are all being discussed.”

• • •

Police won’t commit to saying which of the motive scenarios they believe is most likely, although off the record they say Orlando Anderson was the shooter. Years after the primary investigations, it’s still anyone’s guess. No one was ever arrested, but, as Metro P.D.'s Sergeant Kevin Manning pointed out, no was ever ruled out as a suspect, either.

And no one means no one. One final theory transcends all
the others, and implicates the white record-company power brokers themselves. Death Row is a black-owned label, but it was financed by white corporate bosses who, it’s long been alleged, have profited by exploiting young black men from the ghetto. Use ‘em up and throw ‘em away is the charge. Tupac Shakur’s legal problems alone had become a public-relations nightmare for Death Row’s parent corporation. Add to that the public attack on Time Warner over gangsta-rap lyrics (Time Warner eventually sold its stake in Interscope), and you have the foundation for a monster conspiracy scenario, the proportions of which dwarf anything previously discussed. Backers of this motive conclude that the murders of Biggie Smalls and Yafeu Fula were crafted to look like gang retaliation to cover tracks.

Writer Kevin Powell said rappers and people in the music business are afraid to speculate about who killed Tupac Shakur. “That’s the talk, to be honest, on the streets,” Powell said. “It may have been gang members who pulled the trigger. People believe there may be people behind it, people bigger than gang members. People are afraid to even speculate. It’s much more profound than Death Row-Bad Boy. Will we ever know who killed John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King?”

Out of the 9,250 people who died in 1996 in Clark County, 5,528 were reported to the coroner’s office and 3,138 were accepted for investigation. Of those, 978 were autopsied, including Tupac’s body. Coroner Ron Flud at the time had a staff of 17 investigators, including Dr. Ed Brown, who went to the hospital and confirmed Tupac’s death, toe-tagged him, put him in a body bag, and arranged to have his body taken to the office for an autopsy.

Flud, who in 1996 had been with the Clark County coroner’s office for 12 years, was born in Muleshoe, Texas. He moved to Las Vegas to attend UNLV. After earning a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, he became a patrol officer for the North Las Vegas Police Department. He later obtained a graduate degree from Golden Gate University in San Francisco. He started as an investigator with the coroner’s office until he was elected to the coroner’s post, in 1983. At the time of Tupac Shakur’s death, Flud was earning $100,000 a year (not including benefits).

The coroner’s offices, on Pinto Lane, have been expanded since Tupac’s death. Before that, the quarters were crowded and cramped.

The close quarters led to inefficiencies in performance. For example, the discrepancy in Tupac’s body weight and height
written on the coroner’s report. Human error was at fault.

Today, offices of the coroner and medical examiners are in a new state-of-the-art facility. The Clark County coroner is the administrative head with a staff of about 40 people, including forensics, investigation, and administration. The office performs an average of 1,100 autopsies a year.

In the old building, medical investigators sat just one foot from each other and a few steps away from the scale on which bodies were weighed.

After the examiners finished the autopsy of Tupac’s body, a worker made a red checkmark next to the name “Lesane Crooks” on a wall board hanging near the examination room indicating that the autopsy of the body had been completed.

• • •

In February 1997, I visited the Clark County Office of Vital Statistics and viewed Tupac Shakur’s original death certificate. They would not give me a copy, but they allowed me to look at the original and take notes, with an employee sitting next to me. The only copy released was to Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur.

The original document remains on file with the county. I read the certificate, which was in a binder filed in a cabinet at the county office. It stands as the official notice of death. It should be noted that it is against Nevada Revised Statute to fake, forge, or sign a public document, including death certificates. Tupac Shakur’s death certificate includes the following:

• Tupac Amaru Shakur was pronounced dead by Dr. Lovett at 4:03 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 13, 1996, at University Medical Center’s Intensive Care Unit.

• The one-page death certificate was filed with Clark County’s vital records section by County Coroner Ron Flud on Sept. 18, 1996. Dr. Ed Brown with the Coroner’s office signed the certificate.

• Afeni Shakur made a positive identification of her son’s body at 5 p.m. at the hospital. His body was then taken
by Davis Mortuary to the morgue, three blocks away. An autopsy was performed and the official cause of death was respiratory failure and cardiopulmonary arrest in connection with multiple gunshot wounds.

• Shakur’s occupation was listed as “rap singer” and the company he worked for was shown as “Euphanasia” in Los Angeles, California.

• A Clark County seal was stamped on the certificate, making it an official and legal document.

• • •

The mortuary van carrying Tupac Shakur’s body drove from the hospital to the morgue. The driver maneuvered the three blocks without being noticed, or so he thought. But fans did eventually make it there and pounded on the back door. Because of that, Coroner Ron Flud decided not to wait and do the autopsy the next day, but to do it that afternoon. Flud was worried about fans breaking in to get a glimpse of Tupac’s corpse.

An autopsy was done the evening of September 13, 1996, according to authorities.

While the autopsy report is not deemed by Nevada state law to be public information, the coroner’s report is available to the public. However, after I got a copy for a $5 fee, an office employee later said it had been given to me in error, and that they would not be releasing it to anyone because of the ongoing homicide investigation. To my knowledge, I am the only reporter to have a copy of that report. Six 35-millimeter photos taken during and after the autopsy are on file at the coroner’s office, along with the report.

According to statements on the four-page coroner’s report, Tupac Shakur’s remains were positively identified by his mother, Afeni Shakur. The autopsy determined that Tupac had no illegal drugs in his system. He was, however, heavily sedated during his hospital stay, it says. He was shot in his right hand, right hip, and right chest just under his right arm.

“I interviewed the decedent’s mother, Afeni Shakur, and she stated that the decedent was not married and he had no children,” coroner Investigator Ed Brown wrote in his report. “She stated that Tupac A. Shakur was his name. She was not able to give any more information than this.”

• • •

When Tupac arrived at University Medical Center’s trauma center, immediately following the shooting, he was wheeled into the recovery area and “was resuscitated according to advanced-trauma-life support protocol,” the report said, and “a full trauma activation was called.”

He was placed on life-support machines. Two liters of blood that had hemorrhaged into his chest cavity were removed. His pulse was “very thready and initially he had a minimal blood pressure, which rapidly declined.”

In a conversation with Ed Brown at the hospital following Tupac’s death, the surgeon told Brown that Tupac’s injuries included a gunshot wound to his right chest with a “massive hemothorax” and a gunshot wound to the right thigh with “the bullet palpable within the abdomen.” Tupac also had a gunshot wound to a right finger with a fracture. The pre-operative diagnosis was a gunshot wound to the chest and abdomen and post-operative bleeding.

He was taken immediately to the operating room for operative intervention and further resuscitation. His right lung was removed.

Tupac underwent two surgeries. The first began at 6:26 p.m. on September 8th and lasted an hour. The surgery consisted of exploratory procedures, the surgeon wrote. He also noted that it appeared Tupac had had some prior surgery for bullet wounds in his upper-right chest area.

The second operation at University Medical Center consisted of “ligation of bleeding” and removal of a bullet from his pelvic area. It was done at midnight on September 8th and completed at 2:35 a.m. on September 9th.

The one bullet remaining in Tupac’s chest was not removed during surgery, but during the autopsy, Coroner Ron Flud told me. It then became evidence, he said.

Tupac was pronounced dead at 4:03 p.m. September 13th by Dr. James Lovett at University Medical Center. Clark County Coroner Investigator Ed Brown was called to the hospital at 4:15 p.m.

“Upon my arrival ... I found no apparent life signs, and trauma was observed to the right hand, right hip and right chest under the right arm, apparently caused from gunshots.'’

Even though Tupac Amaru Shakur was gunned down on the streets of Las Vegas in front of at least 100 people, there are those who refuse to believe that he died from the wounds he suffered that hot September night. “Dead or alive?” is the question that has surfaced again and again concerning the 25-year-old gangsta rap artist and film star.