The Killing of Tupac Shakur (30 page)

Some people, no matter what they hear or see, have chosen to believe that Tupac is still alive, sequestered somewhere in Cuba, with sightings in Manhattan, Arizona (perhaps because of its close proximity to Las Vegas), South America, and the Caribbean.

New conspiracy theories claiming Tupac is still alive cropped up, for at least a couple of years after his death, every day; the World Wide Web remains cluttered with their rationalizations. Internet chat rooms are full of discussions on whether he did, in fact, pass away. They often ignore logic and facts, opting instead for their own “explanations.”

For those who refuse to accept Tupac’s death, each time a new song or video is released, they assert it’s proof of Tupac’s existence. They can’t seem to comprehend the fact that he recorded the music
before
his death. If the track was released after the shooting, in their minds, it must have been
recorded
after the shooting. Therefore, to their way of
thinking, he was still alive and well.

Also fueling the rumors was a song titled “God Bless the Dead.” It begins with Tupac shouting, “Rest in peace ... Biggie Smalls!” The Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, of course, was killed after Tupac. The Biggie Smalls mentioned in the track was a lesser-known California rapper, an old friend of Tupac’s who was killed in a drive-by shooting. Puffy Combs once explained it to a reporter like this: “There was another rapped called Biggie Smalls, so we couldn’t use that name. [Christopher Wallace] wanted to call himself ‘Notorious.’” To prevent confusion with the other Smalls, Biggie devised a new moniker by simply adding “Notorious” in front of his nickname “Big.” He still, though, referred to himself as Biggie Smalls, but did not use it as a stage name, because it was already taken.

At the top of the “alive” list is the seven-day theory (Tupac was shot on September 7; the numbers in his age, 2-5, add up to seven).

Rapper Chuck D, who sings with Public Enemy, has posted “Chuck D’s 18 Compelling Reasons Why 2Pac is not Dead” on the Internet. They include the “Makaveli theory”—named after the Italian philosopher Machiavelli, who talked about faking his own death in his works. Tupac was introduced to Machiavelli, including his book
The Prince,
first in high school and later in prison. He often made references to Machiavelli to friends. He named his last album
The 7 Day Theory
under the pseudonym Makaveli, thus the seven-day theory.

Another of Chuck D’s “compelling reasons": “The cover of [Tupac’s] next album has 2Pac looking like Jesus Christ. Could he be planning a resurrection?”

Chuck D also claimed that “Las Vegas is still very much a mob town. No one gets killed on the Strip. You have to pretty much get permission in order for something like this to happen. Who was calling the shots on this one?” (Chuck D has since changed his stance and backed away from the theories he helped get started.)

Much of the speculation has maintained that medical
examiners never did an autopsy, that, naysayers say, Tupac’s remains weren’t cremated as the funeral-home employees confirmed they were, and that his mother had helped him secure a new identity so he could spend the rest of his days out of the limelight in the solitude of Cuba.

So prominent were the rumors, the police and county officials were forced to comment on them. Metro Police Lieutenant Wayne Petersen told an Associated Press reporter, “The public believes he staged his own death, for whatever reason.”

University Medical Center, where Tupac died, was deluged with telephone calls. “[The rumor] started probably a couple of weeks after he died,” Dale Pugh, a hospital spokesman, said. “It kind of escalated for a while, [then tapered off], but we still get an occasional call. Apparently there’s a lot of stuff on the Internet claiming he’s still alive, and that may be refueling the rumors.

“I have a son in high school, and he comes home and tells me that he hears Tupac is still alive, that his death was a hoax, and that there was this giant conspiracy to allow him to escape to a more favorable environment. We get calls from people saying they hear the doctor who cared for him has been arrested by the FBI and that the FBI is investigating a conspiracy. It’s gotten pretty wild.”

“There’s the big rumor,” said Ron Flud, the Clark County coroner, “that’s taken on a life of its own. “TV called me and said, ‘We understand that Tupac’s not dead.’ I told them, ‘Well, I can guarantee you he’s not down at K-mart with Elvis.’”

• • •

Theories aside, the fact is that Tupac is dead. Here’s the proof.

First, for Tupac to have faked his own death, he would have had to have the cooperation of not only his family, friends, and associates; but of the Clark County Sheriff, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s patrol, traffic,
and bike cops, general-assignment and homicide detectives, criminalist investigators, lab technicians, dispatchers, and public affairs officer; Nevada Highway Patrol troopers and dispatchers; Mercy Ambulance paramedics and dispatchers; Clark County Fire Department firefighters, paramedics, and dispatchers; University Medical Center nurses, doctors, and administrators; the Clark County Coroner and his entire staff of examiners, technicians, and clerks; not to mention reporters and photographers who were on the scene shortly after the shooting. In other words, it would take a conspiracy of epic proportions.

Much of the speculation seems to stem from the air of secretiveness surrounding post-mortem activities. Dale Pugh of University Medical Center, said, “Personally, and I’ve thought about this a lot—I suspect one of the reasons this still goes around is the media never saw the body leave the hospital, because we didn’t want to turn that into some sort of circus. His body went out another exit from the hospital, from the back. That was our decision based on respect for the patient and based on respect for the family and based on the large number of people outside the hospital. We were uncertain as to what might happen and felt that it would be better to take another approach. And we did. As soon as he passed away, we called the media. And as soon as the body was out of the hospital, we again notified the media.”

Friends and relatives were allowed to see Tupac in the intensive-care unit at University Medical Center, where he lay for six days in a coma until his death on September 13, 1996. After he succumbed to his wounds, Tupac’s mother, Afeni, positively identified her son at the hospital. His body was quickly moved to the coroner’s office, where the autopsy was performed.

“At a typical autopsy,” coroner Ron Flud said, “the people normally in the room are the pathologist, forensic technician, the crime-scene analyst, and the detectives assigned to the case. Look at the number of people who would have had to be involved in this to say that there’s some kind
of conspiracy or cover-up to facilitate Tupac. I’d never even heard of Tupac [before the shooting].”

The coroner’s office in Las Vegas keeps busy. In the fastest-growing city in America, with 4,000 to 6,000 people moving to Las Vegas each month and more than 35 million tourists visiting each year, the crime rate has grown nearly as rapidly as the population. Murders in Las Vegas Valley skyrocketed to an all-time high in 1996; Tupac was one of 207 people murdered in Clark County in that year.

After Tupac’s body was taken by a mortuary ambulance to the morgue, a decision was made by both Clark County Coroner Flud, along with a sergeant and two detectives from homicide, to go ahead with the autopsy that evening. It’s not unusual for the process to move quickly in Las Vegas. Examiners often perform autopsies on victims the same day their bodies are brought in, especially in homicide cases. In this case, for security reasons, the coroner didn’t want the body to stay in the morgue overnight. Too many people knew where the coroner’s offices were around the corner from the hospital where a 24-hour vigil had begun six days earlier, following the shooting. Hundreds of people had flocked to the hospital when they heard the news. It was too risky to keep the body until the next day.

Often, homicide detectives follow the coroner to his office so they can witness the autopsy not long after a homicide is committed. Homicide’s Sergeant Manning and Detectives Becker and Franks met the ambulance at the coroner’s office. The investigators were in the coroner’s examining room as medical examiners performed Tupac’s postmortem exam.

The coroner finished with his examination, autopsy, and coroner’s report, and handed over Tupac’s body to Davis Funeral Home, across the street from the hospital, at 2127 West Charleston Boulevard. No doubt Afeni chose the mortuary because of its close proximity to both the hospital and coroner’s office. Also, it wasn’t far from the Golden Nugget downtown where she had been staying all week. The mortuary employees, in turn, cremated Tupac’s body overnight, at
Tupac’s mother’s request.

It’s no small task, making arrangements to move a body from one state to another. That had to have played a role in Mrs. Shakur’s decision to have her son’s remains cremated with his ashes scattered, instead of burying his body.

Following a brief memorial service in the Las Vegas funeral parlor with a few friends and family, Afeni Shakur boarded a plane and returned to her home in Stone Mountain, Georgia, near Atlanta. It was a little more than 24 hours after her only son—and oldest child—had been pronounced dead.

The ashes of Tupac’s body were later scattered over a grassy area in a park in Los Angeles, where Tupac had spent the last years of his life. A small group of family members and friends were invited to the private informal ceremony. There was no pomp and circumstance for the fallen rapper; the brief ceremony honoring him was conducted with quiet dignity. Afeni Shakur is not a woman who dwells on tragedy; rather, she has spent her life on the empowerment of the human spirit to survive and soar.

Keith Clinscates, an executive at
Vibe
magazine, issued a statement about the rumors surrounding the rapper’s death. “Tupac had a huge presence in the community that loved and respected him. [His death] was a human tragedy,” he said, calling rumors that he was alive cruel and unkind to the Shakur family. “These [rappers] are not comic-book heroes. These are real people.”

Tupac, unfortunately, did die. Those who claim otherwise argue that no photographs showing Tupac’s injuries were ever seen. But photos were taken, plenty of them; they just never made it to the press. Any photo of Tupac Shakur in the hospital or in the coroner’s office would have fetched a tidy sum from tabloid periodicals, so they were—and still are—kept under lock and key.

Lieutenant Brad Simpson, who oversees Metro’s criminalistics unit, which includes the photo lab, said his office’s photos of the Tupac Shakur investigation have been locked up.

“The only copies of the homicide photos that we keep,”
he said, “are one set kept with the crime-scene reports and one with homicide. There was interest from some of the tabloids in getting some of those photos. The tabloids offered a lot of money, but they didn’t get any photos. They made the offer to the coroner’s office. We knew that after the Jon Bonet Ramsey case in Boulder, Colorado, we had to be careful. We have tighter controls here.”

County Coroner Ron Flud was surprised when he received a mysterious phone call from a man who told the receptionist the call was “personal.”

Flud took the call in his office. “The person was being clandestine and said he represented a client who would like to purchase something and would like to meet with me. I told him, ‘I don’t meet with people.’ He said, ‘Well, you have some photos.’ I knew at that point where he was headed. I stopped him and said, ‘No.’ At that point, he hung up on me.”

Flud said he assumed the man calling him was from a tabloid publication, but he didn’t stay on the phone long enough to find out. He knew about reports of other calls to LVMPD offering as much as $100,000 for a photo.

“Because of the
Globe
and the
National Enquirer
, [the photos] are under lock and key,” Brad Simpson agreed. “It’s a policy violation. We’d probably fire the son-of-a bitch too.”

Tupac’s former bodyguard, Frank Alexander, said the offer was for even more.

“There was an offer going around that a photo of Tupac either dead or hooked up to machines would pay $250,000,” Frank said during an interview from his Ontario ranch in southern California. “We weren’t going to allow that to happen. That’s why there are no photos of him in the hospital. I was on duty that morning, the day he died. From the very beginning, he always had a bodyguard there in addition to the hospital security guards.”

Photos, however, were taken of Tupac’s body by a number of different people during and after his autopsy. All but one have been accounted for and secured. The one that got away is published in the center photo spread of this book.
The photo is explicit. It’s not easy to look at. That’s because it’s real. It’s the image of Tupac Shakur lying on a gurney at the morgue, with his chest opened; that’s what coroners do when they autopsy bodies. A skull and crossbones tattooed on his right arm are clear and recognizable. The incision doctors made a few days earlier to remove his right lung is visible just above “Thug” on his lower chest. However graphic and gruesome it may be, the photograph in this book should forever dispel any theories that Tupac faked his own death.

• • •

Journalist Veronica Chambers, who interviewed Tupac while he was on the set of the film
Poetic Justice
, wrote in
Esquire
, “Of all the rumors and conspiracy theories I’ve heard since Tupac died, only one has reverberated inside my head: ‘I’ve heard that Tupac isn’t really dead.’ A friend said, ‘Why did they cremate the body right away? In Las Vegas, where they had no family or friends?’

“I shrugged. I make it a point never to argue down conspiracy theories.

“‘What I heard is that Afeni has had Tupac’s identity changed, and shipped him to Cuba.’ As I listened to my friend, what surprised me was how my heart leaped at the thought of Tupac alive ...

“[On the set] I asked [Tupac] if he didn’t think that staying in the Valley, instead of going out and instigating all the trouble he did, would make him live longer. He looked at me as if I were crazy. ‘It would be an honor to die in the hood,’ he said solemnly, as if he were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. ‘Don’t let me die in Saudi Arabia. These motherfuckers are rushing with a flag to die on foreign soil, fighting for motherfuckers that don’t care about us. I’d rather die in the hood, where I get my love. I’m not saying I want to die, but if I got to die, let me die in the line of duty, the duty of the hood.’”