Legendary rap pioneer Tupac Amaru Shakur was a man ahead of his time. His controversial lyrics made him a “Thug” to America, but a hero to black communities. Unfortunately his life was taken at the tender age of 25 in Las Vegas, NV on September 13, 1996. His killer has still not been identified almost 18 years later. Now a police officer named Chris Carroll, now retired from Las Vegas Police Department has stated he heard the last words to come from Shakur’s mouth.
He is coming forward this information since he is now retired and action cannot be taken against him for discussing the case. This is what occurred according to Carroll. “I grab the car door and I’m trying to open it, but I can’t get it open,” he says. “[Knight] keeps coming up on my back, so I’m pointing my gun at him. I’m pointing it at the car. I’m yelling, ‘You guys lay down! And you, get the fuck away from me!’ And every time I’d point the gun at him, he’d back off and even lift his hands up, like ‘All right! All right!’ So I’d go back to the car, and here he comes again. I’m like, ‘Fucker, back off!’ This guy is huge, and the whole time he’s running around at the scene, he’s gushing blood from his head. Gushing blood! I mean the guy had clearly been hit in the head, but he had all his faculties. I couldn’t believe he was running around and doing what he was doing, yelling back and forth.”
He then talks about opening the door of the Cadillac and trying to grab him, “”So I grabbed him with my left arm, and he falls into me, and I’ve still got my gun in the other hand,” he continues. “He’s covered with blood, and I immediately notice that the guy’s got a ton of gold on – a necklace and other jewelry – and all of the gold is covered in blood. That has always left an image in my mind. . . After I pulled him out, Suge starts yelling at him, ‘Pac! Pac!’ And he just keeps yelling it. And the guy I’m holding is trying to yell back at him. He’s sitting up and he’s struggling to get the words out, but he can’t really do it. And as Suge is yelling ‘Pac!,’ I look down and I realize that this is Tupac Shakur.” Caroll stated he attempted to obtain a dying declaration of a potential suspect, but Pac was not having it. Tupac let it be known how he felt about the boys in blue and held nothing back when it came to that topic.
‘”And then I saw in his face, in his movements, all of a sudden in the snap of a finger, he changed,” he says. “And he went from struggling to speak, being non-cooperative, to an ‘I’m at peace’ type of thing. Just like that. . . He went from fighting to ‘I can’t do it.’ And when he made that transition, he looked at me, and he’s looking right in my eyes. And that’s when I looked at him and said one more time, ‘Who shot you?’. . . He looked at me and he took a breath to get the words out, and he opened his mouth, and I thought I was actually going to get some cooperation. And then the words came out: ‘Fuck you.’ After that, he started gurgling and slipping out of consciousness.”
Carroll says he is assured Tupac did not speak to anyone else after that. “As soon as he got to the hospital, he went into surgery and was heavily sedated, and I guess he went into a coma and really never came out of that, until they took him off of life support,” he continues. “So that moment I talked to him was his last real living moment where he was speaking. I talked to the cop who rode in the ambulance with him. He said Tupac never came out of it, and he never said anything at the hospital. There was nothing else.”
Did Pac live by the code of the streets up to his death or did he just no longer give a damn? Tupac’s video for his hit ‘I Aint Mad At Cha” acted as a premonition to the world of his death. The video and how it was acted out in real life was similar. For me all I know is that he was a great artist, poet and actor and not many can live up to his status. He has the number one spot on my list of the best rappers. My opinion, agree, disagree…but we definitely can’t take what he has achieved away from him.
