The Killing of Tupac Shakur (9 page)

“They were in three cars. Their cars were parked in the middle of the street, right next to the median. When the BMW came to rest, it was in the middle of the intersection at Harmon and the Boulevard. It was facing kind of southeast, turned to the left, cocked, like Knight was in the middle of making a left turn when he was stopped. It had four flat tires. The rims were bent from going over the curbs.”

No one knows where Suge was trying to head by attempting a left turn onto Harmon from the Strip.

Dispatch had called detectives from general assignment to investigate before a homicide team was called in. General-assignment detectives arrived and tried to interview the witnesses. But the scene was chaotic. Everyone on the street knew it was Tupac. He was easily recognized by music and film fans. A large crowd had gathered. People had begun charging the car, trying to rip off the side-view mirrors, wire-rimmed hubcaps, door handles—anything they could grab. The cops yelled at them to get back and threatened to arrest anyone who got near the car. A few officers had to physically keep people back. At the very least, it was the scene of an attempted homicide and the car held crucial evidence. The police, including officers McDonald and Holyoak, secured the perimeter, protecting the crime scene, until investigators and the lone crime analyst were finished working it.

Malcolm Payne, chief photographer for the
Herald Dispatch
newspaper in South Central Los Angeles, was on assignment in Las Vegas covering the Tyson fight. He had returned to his hotel room at the Aladdin Hotel across the street from where the BMW came to a stop. He looked out his window to the street scene below.

“I saw the yellow tape and police and realized there had to be a murder or something,” he said. “I grabbed my camera and went down there.”

When he got to the street, he asked what had happened. “A little boy told me, ‘Tupac got killed.’ He said, ‘That’s the car he was riding in.’

“Immediately, what went through my head was the scene
out of ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’ The car was all shot up. I said to myself that this was history and I was going to shoot it. So I pulled out my camera and started taking pictures. Tupac was like a legend, and it was his last ride, you know?”

Payne began shooting photos of the car, riddled with bullet holes, and of the witnesses from Tupac’s entourage as they were being interviewed by detectives. Yellow crime-scene tape separated the witnesses from the crowd gathered on the street. The street was closed; police had blocked off the Strip to through traffic.

“The ambulance was gone,” Payne said. “I got a shot of some of the guys [Tupac’s entourage]. They were upset. I shot them sitting on the sidewalk. The police had them blocked off with yellow tape. They kept them there for quite some time, at least two hours. Their cars were right there, on the side [of the road].

“When I got there the street was blocked off. You had plainclothes, uniforms, and the guys who ride around Vegas on bicycles. And they’d brought out a dog team. Somebody told them the gun was thrown out in the median, so they had the dogs out searching in the median for the gun. It seemed like the police were trying to do a thorough investigation at that crime scene. They were really trying to find the gun. They were tearing that car up too.”

Payne turned out to be the only still photographer at the crime scene. The police took photographs, but theirs weren’t for public consumption, and have since been locked away in a file cabinet inside LVMPD’s photo lab with a “420” [murder] label.

When the detectives arrived, then-Officer Michael McDonald said, they investigated three different scenes: the location of the shooting at Flamingo and Koval; the spot where Suge made the left turn from Flamingo onto the Strip; and the center divider where Suge’s car stopped for good. They also backtracked to make sure there weren’t any bullet casings strewn elsewhere.

“Everybody locked down the scene. When you know it’s
a blatant homicide, you lock the scene down till detectives can get there. You put cones over the casings, cordon off the crime scene, put the tape up, keep witnesses from talking to each other. We were there for hours, way into overtime,” McDonald said.

Once the street was reopened to one lane, officers stopped some drivers to question them. They were looking for witnesses. They found none. Reports that cops were stopping only black male drivers were untrue, said Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Steve Harney and LVMPD bike cop Michael McDonald, both of whom were there when motorists were being stopped.

“We do not do that,” Harney said. “When we did stop people to question them, we stopped everybody. It wasn’t just black male adults. We treat everybody the same.”

• • •

Unlike the location where the BMW came to rest, the shooting scene at Flamingo and Koval in front of the Maxim Hotel wasn’t secured right away, police said.

“It made it tougher to investigate,” Sergeant Kevin Manning later admitted. “Within a relatively short period of time, that scene was secured enough so that there was still evidence present. But if any of it had been moved, like cars hitting it, how do we know?”

State trooper Steve Harney added, “You’ve got to understand, when it’s a shooting, unless it’s in a house, if you’re on an interstate or a busy street, you’re not going to have as much preservation of evidence.”

When the K-9 unit arrived, the officer and his dog went to work a mile away, where Suge and Tupac ended up, not at the crime scene where the shooting actually had taken place. At that point, police were under the wrong impression that the gunfire had erupted on the Strip. Had police immediately talked with members of Tupac’s entourage, they might have told them that the Cadillac had fled and which way it had
gone. But by the time the general-assignment detectives arrived and began questioning witnesses, not only had enough time gone by for the Cadillac to flee without a trace, but the entourage members were irate.

Detectives were surprised when Tupac’s friends who’d witnessed the shooting wouldn’t talk. They weren’t willing to give up any information at all after the patrol cops had thrown them face down on the street’s blacktop. They made it very clear afterward that they were angry with the way officers had treated them. Though Metro police called it “standard procedure,” when its officers treated potential witnesses to the highest profile murder case in the history of the department like suspected criminals, they forever alienated the all-important members of the entourage, including Suge Knight. All hope of establishing cooperation from the witnesses vanished within those first few minutes. Las Vegas police gained nothing and lost everything.

Suge Knight described to a reporter the actions of police toward him that night like this: “The police jacked me up like a ’57 Chevy.” Needless to say, Suge wasn’t talking either.

Detectives eventually questioned witnesses from the first crime scene about the actual shooting. Witnesses talked some, but not a lot—and there were inconsistencies. Some told detectives the Cadillac had California license plates. Others said Nevada. No one was sure. In addition, there were early reports that the shooters were women, but according to LVMPD Lieutenant Larry Spinosa, that’s not what the police ultimately concluded. People on the street that night may have been referring to the women who were in the Chrysler sedan near Suge’s BMW when the shots were fired.

According to Sergeant Kevin Manning, when detectives arrived at the scene of the shooting, the four women were still there. They were escorted to an interview room at Metro Police’s headquarters downtown, in Las Vegas City Hall on the second floor at Stewart Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard. The women, all from California, were not planted at the intersection to set up Tupac and Suge, nor were they used
as distractions while the gunman drove up in the Cadillac, Manning insisted. It was a coincidence. The women told police they didn’t see the shooter. Five years later, their names have not been released to protect them, homicide Detective Brent Becker said.

Becker agreed that the women were not vital to the investigation. “They were just people in the mess,” he said. “They’re just like everybody else who was on the street that night. There were a lot of women nearby. There’s no significance. I’d sure hate to hear about four women getting jammed up because someone thinks they’re strong witnesses.”

Most of the witnesses, including bystanders on the street, told the officers it looked like there were four men, all African-American, inside the four-door Cadillac. Witnesses also told police that no one in the Cadillac had gotten out of the car and that the shots were fired from inside the car, from the back seat on the driver’s side. Some later reports had one gunman getting out and tracking Tupac, aiming directly for his side of the car, but police said that was not the case.

And then there were the eyewitnesses who were in the cars behind Tupac when the shooting erupted. Several from Tupac’s entourage were taken downtown by general-assignment detectives early the next morning for questioning, according to Becker, instead of being interviewed on the street. Bodyguard Frank Alexander and rapper Malcolm Greenridge, who were in the car behind Tupac and Suge, both told police they didn’t see anything and were allowed to leave. Later, they recanted their stories, telling the
Los Angeles Times
that homicide detectives had never asked them if they could identify the shooter.

Then there was 19-year-old Yafeu Fula, the member of Tupac’s back-up rap group, Outlawz Immortal. He was the third man in the car with Alexander and Greenridge. He was interviewed briefly on the street that night by homicide detectives. He told them he would probably be able to pick out the shooter from a photo line-up of suspects. Police took his name and telephone number. He was the best eyewitness
police talked to that night. Of all the potential witnesses to the shooting, only Yafeu Fula claimed to have seen anything. But officers let him go without interviewing him in depth. It would turn out to be their last opportunity to question him.

• • •

Within 48 hours of the shooting, on the following Monday, Las Vegas police called what would be their only news conference on the subject of Tupac Shakur. The national media, as well as local print, radio, and broadcast reporters and photographers, attended. What made the conference unusual were the entertainment reporters standing shoulder to shoulder with the hard-news reporters who are accustomed to following and reporting homicides.

Sergeant Manning, along with then-Sergeant Greg McCurdy from LVMPD’s Public Affairs Office, held the news briefing on the lawn next to the executive-park building on West Charleston Boulevard that houses homicide’s offices. With cameras and mikes aimed at him, Manning, visibly nervous, stood in the shade of the trees to avoid the blazing midday sun. By afternoon, the temperature had soared to nearly 100 degrees.

The sergeant read a brief statement—his original press release of the shooting—then fielded questions from reporters. For some, it would be the only opportunity they would have to speak directly to the lead investigator on the Tupac case. Most of the reporters’ questions were about the assailant; some asked about Tupac’s condition. One asked about the gun.

“We have not and will not make any comments about the gun. It’s the only real physical evidence we have,” Sergeant Manning said, referring to information that ballistics uncovered from the shell casings and bullets. “I know what’s out there [in the media]. Semiautomatic would be accurate. Glock [a semi-automatic Glock pistol] has been mentioned. We don’t know where the Glock is coming from. We have never said that.”

In response to a reporter’s question, Manning addressed the rumor that Suge Knight, not Tupac, was the intended target. Reporting anything differently, he said, “is not based on the facts of the case.”

“The gunfire hit the passenger on the passenger side,” he continued. “I assume the passenger was the target.”

Several reporters walked up to Manning after the news conference and handed him their business cards, asking to be faxed or called if anything new were to come up. The homicide sergeant wasn’t happy “dealing”—as he called it—with reporters, especially national ones. They were a nuisance and didn’t serve his purposes. Later, Manning complained that interruptions from reporters were what was keeping him from investigating Tupac’s murder. Still, according to sources, when the national magazines and newspapers came out with ample quotes from and photos of the sergeant, he went from newsstands to magazine racks, buying up souvenir copies for himself.

The feeling at LVMPD toward the media has sometimes tended toward disdain and mistrust. When reporters call to ask about a crime or an internal investigation into misconduct by an officer, they’re often met with remarks like, “That’s old news; why are you asking about that?” or “That’s not a story.” The thinking inside Las Vegas’ homicide unit (and, for that matter, other units within the LVMPD) is that they should only answer questions from reporters if it serves LVMPD’s investigative purposes. Considerations of the “public’s right to know,” often with even the most basic information, have traditionally taken a back seat. It’s a tough system for many local reporters to work through.

Over the next few weeks, with international media attention focused on the shooting and death of Tupac Shakur, detectives Becker and Franks would go on camera only once, making an appearance on the Fox Network’s “America’s Most Wanted” program. But Sergeant Manning wouldn’t allow his homicide team to be interviewed on camera—or off, for that matter—by “Unsolved Mysteries” when producers from
Burbank, California, came to town to produce their own segment about the murder.

“They can’t help us,” Manning explained. “It would be of no use to us in our investigation.” The decision was made despite the fact that “Unsolved” at that point was reported to have more viewers than “America’s Most Wanted” and a better “solve rate.” According to an “Unsolved Mysteries” producer, one of the reasons detectives declined was because “Unsolved” also airs what the producer called their “ugga bugga stories,” such as UFO sightings and tales of spontaneous human combustion, sandwiched between true unsolved crime stories. “America’s Most Wanted” reports only crime and missing-persons cases.