Shakur grew up in tough neighborhoods and homeless shelters in the Bronx, Harlem and Baltimore. His mother, Afeni Shakur, also a Black Panther, was charged with conspiring to blow up a block of New York department stores-and acquitted a month before the rapper was born. Shakur’s stepfather, Black Panther leader Mutulu Shakur, was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list until the early 1980s, when he was imprisoned for robbery and murder. Pratt was freed after a judge ruled in 1997 that prosecutors concealed evidence favorable to the defendant. His godfather, Black Panther leader Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, spent 27 years in prison for a robbery-murder in Santa Monica that he insisted he did not commit. Radical politics shaped his upbringing and the rebellious tone of much of his music. Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in 1971 into a family of black revolutionaries and named after a martyred Incan warrior. The 25-year-old Shakur had helped elevate rap from a crude street fad to a complex art form, setting the stage for the current global hip-hop phenomenon. The slaying silenced one of modern music’s most eloquent voices-a ghetto poet whose tales of urban alienation captivated young people of all races and backgrounds. This account of what they and others did that night is based on police affidavits and court documents as well as interviews with investigators, witnesses to the crime and members of the Southside Crips who had never before discussed the killing outside the gang.įearing retribution, they agreed to be interviewed only if their names were not revealed. and Anderson denied any role in Shakur’s death. That killing also remains unsolved.īefore they died, Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down six months later in Los Angeles. and Shakur had been feuding for more than a year, exchanging insults on recordings and at award shows and concerts. * The murder weapon was supplied by New York rapper Notorious B.I.G., who agreed to pay the Crips $1 million for killing Shakur. He was later killed in an unrelated gang shooting. Las Vegas police discounted Anderson as a suspect and interviewed him only once, briefly. * Orlando Anderson, the Crip whom Shakur had attacked, fired the fatal shots.
* The shooting was carried out by a Compton gang called the Southside Crips to avenge the beating of one of its members by Shakur a few hours earlier. Evidence gathered by the paper indicates: Another persistent legend is that Shakur faked his own death to escape the pressures of stardom.Ī yearlong investigation by The Times reconstructed the crime and the events leading up to it.
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One is that Knight, owner of Shakur’s record label, arranged the killing so he could exploit the rapper’s martyrdom commercially. Speculation and wild theories continue to flourish in the music media and among Shakur’s followers. Las Vegas police have never made an arrest. Six years later, the killing of the world’s most famous rap star remains officially unsolved.
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