The Killing of Tupac Shakur (5 page)

In an article printed in the
New York Daily News
on Wednesday, September 11, Doctor Fildes said, “It’s a very fatal injury. Statistically, it carries a very high mortality rate. A patient may die from lack of oxygen or may bleed to death in the chest.”

Tupac underwent two surgeries to stop the internal bleeding. The second was to remove his right lung, a measure doctors said was the only way to stop the bleeding. Still, the bleeding persisted; Tupac’s doctors were stumped. A third surgery was scheduled, but Tupac died before it could be done.

It was Friday the 13th.

• • •

Patricia Cunningham, a radio reporter and correspondent for Sheridan Broadcasting, sat down inside the hospital and talked with Billy Garland, Tupac’s father, and Kidada Jones, Tupac’s girlfriend. Patricia, looking for interviews for a radio piece she was working on, had been introduced on Monday, September 9th, to Garland by a black minister from the Las Vegas community. She’d visited with Billy for a while, then left. She returned the next day and again met with Billy Garland. While she was sitting in the trauma center’s waiting room with Tupac’s father, Kidada walked up to them. She had just been to Tupac’s room in the intensive-care unit.

Kidada declined to be interviewed by Patricia. “We’re not speaking to the media,” she said.

Still, Cunningham ended up driving Kidada Jones and a bodyguard to a hair salon that day.

“Kidada asked me if I knew where to buy hair products for black people,” Patricia said. “I told her, yes, there were a couple of places.” Kidada asked if the shops were within walking distance from the hospital or if she should take a taxi. Patricia offered to drive Kidada to the shop in Westside for the hair products. Kidada told her she also wanted to buy a CD player so she could play Tupac’s music for him in his room. Billy Garland instructed one of Death Row’s bodyguards to accompany Kidada.

Kidada, the unidentified bodyguard, and Patricia headed to a beauty-supply shop and an indoor swap meet. “As I sat in my van and waited for Kidada and her bodyguard to come outside from the store,” Patricia said, “I thought to myself, ‘No wonder Tupac got shot.’ The people around him were too trusting. They weren’t careful. They knew I was a radio talk-show host and a reporter, but they only knew what I told them. It occurred to me that they didn’t know anything about me. I could have been anybody.”

Earlier in the week, throughout the six days Tupac was in the hospital in a coma, one by one visitors filed in, past the
security guards, to his room in intensive care. Once Tupac passed, however, no one, including Suge and Kidada, was allowed in.

One person Patricia did not see during the week at the hospital was Tupac’s mother.

“I never saw Afeni Shakur,” Cunningham said. “I was at the hospital all day for several days. I never saw her come into the hospital. I don’t know when she came to see him. But it wasn’t when I was there.”

According to the coroner’s report, it was Tupac’s mother Afeni who made the decision not to revive her son. His heart kept failing and doctors kept reviving him. The decision was made that if Tupac’s heart failed once again and he stopped breathing, doctors would not try to bring him back, according to the coroner’s report.

Afeni Shakur explained her decision to ABC’s “Prime Time Live.” “I really felt it was important for Tupac,” she said, “who fought so hard, to have a free spirit. I felt it was important for his spirit to be allowed to be free. So I rejoiced with him, with the release of his spirit. I rejoiced then and I rejoice now – when I’m not crying.”

Patricia Cunningham went to the hospital the day Tupac succumbed to his injuries. When she drove up, Kidada was outside, sitting on the curb, talking to Tupac’s aunt. “I had my son with me,” Cunningham said. “He said, ‘Mom, that’s Kidada Jones, Quincy Jones’s daughter.’ I didn’t know whose daughter she was till then. We went inside. I said, ‘Hi, Kidada. How’re you doing?’ She said, ‘Okay,’ but she looked angry, upset. I said, ‘How is he doing today?’ There’s not been a change, has there?’ She said, ‘I don’t know. I’m not allowed to say. You’ll have to speak to the family about that.’ She sounded like someone had pulled rank and said, ‘You’re just the girlfriend. You’re not family.’”

Once Tupac had passed, Kidada ran outside, in tears, to the hospital parking lot. She was videotaped by a TV cameraman running out of the hospital. “It was so sad,” Patricia Cunningham said. “It broke my heart to see her like that.”

As the news of his death spread across the world, more and more of Tupac’s friends filed into the trauma unit. The scene inside the hospital waiting room was more than somber. Milling around the entrance, on the street, and in the parking lot was a crowd of roughly 100 or more fans. Danny Boy, a teenage rapper and rhythm-and-blues singer with the Death Row label who was said to be Suge’s next hit maker and Tupac’s protégé, broke down and crumbled to the sidewalk outside University Medical Center. In reaction to hearing the bad news that Tupac had died. Danny Boy was the only man at the hospital that day who openly wept for Tupac. He sat on the curb at the double emergency doors to the trauma unit. An unidentified friend of Tupac’s sat down next to Danny Boy, put his arm over his shoulder, and tried to comfort him. Danny Boy appeared to be inconsolable.

A nurse said evening-shift employees scheduled to work that night called in sick because they were afraid to walk through the crowd. Dozens of security guards and police officers, including gang detectives, surrounded the area, but no problems ensued. Not in Las Vegas, anyway. A bloodbath had already begun, however, on the streets of Compton, California, in retaliation, police there said, for Tupac’s shooting.

The driver of a black Lexus pulled up to the hospital, stopping in a no-parking zone in front of the trauma center. Danny Boy cried as he was embraced by one of several men who got out of the car.

It was Suge Knight.

When Suge was notified by telephone that Tupac had died, he was at his Vegas home, having a meeting with his bodyguards, including Frank Alexander.

Suge, six-foot-four and weighing about 300 pounds, was wearing a crisp-white T-shirt, black jeans, and brand new white-leather designer sports shoes. He was smoking a cigar. He opened the front passenger door and got out of the car. Holding the cigar in his right hand, he slowly sauntered from the curbside, strolling past Metro gang cops, fans, and a handful of reporters and photographers. After hugging
Danny Boy, he walked through the automatic glass doors to the trauma center’s security desk in the lobby.

Few people appeared to recognize him. They just stood quietly by and watched. His demeanor told them he was important, but they couldn’t place him. Only one photographer, Marsh Starks, took a photo as Suge approached the hospital to pay his respects, first to his friend Tupac, then to Tupac’s mother, Afeni. Suge looked right through the photographer, giving him a blank stare, and kept walking. His face was devoid of emotion.

Suge had the air of the linebacker and bodyguard he used to be as he somberly walked by. He appeared unconcerned for his own safety, despite rumors circulating that there were three contracts on his head and that he, not Tupac, had been the intended target of the shooter.

What no one knew then – except for the cops – was that Suge had gone earlier that day to register as a felon in the state of Nevada. As a convicted felon, he was required to tell his parole officer whenever he left California and, within 48 hours of arriving in Nevada, he was mandated by law to register with the LVMPD. On the sixth day after Tupac was gunned down and just hours before he succumbed to his wounds, Suge was fingerprinted, had his police mug shot taken, and was added to the state’s convicted-felon registry. His Las Vegas attorney, David Chesnoff (law partner of mob-attorney-turned-mayor Oscar Goodman) had called Suge to remind him that he needed to register.

At the hospital, Suge walked up to the security desk and told the officer on duty, who was planted at the entrance of the trauma unit, that he wanted to go to Tupac’s room. The guard told him no one except family was allowed in. Suge told him he was “Marion Knight.” The security officer drew a blank when he heard his name. “I’m sorry, sir. If you’re not family, I can’t let you in.”

The guard, who was black, later told me that he didn’t know at the time who Suge was. “I felt bad that I couldn’t let him in,” he said. “He seemed frustrated.”

Suge said nothing. Then he learned from others that Tupac’s body was no longer at the hospital, that it had been removed.

Radio correspondent Patricia Cunningham was inside the waiting room when Suge Knight and his entourage arrived. “Suge walked up to the security desk and he said he was Marion Knight and asked to go back [to Tupac’s room],” she said. “They turned him away. Then he said, ‘I’m Suge Knight.’ They looked at him like, ‘Who’s that?’ They didn’t know who he was. He looked so hurt and devastated. He left.”

Later, Suge talked to Afeni Shakur and told her not to worry, that he and Death Row Records would take care of her financially. He told her that he and Tupac had made a promise to each other: The family of whoever died first would be taken care of by the other.

Tupac’s mother told Suge that if there was to be a memorial service, she wanted everyone to wear white, not black. Afterward, in a home-video documentary about Tupac’s life titled
Thug Immortal
, Afeni said, “Tupac has gone to a better place. He’s free now. Nobody can do nothing to him.”

• • •

Deputy medical examiner Ed Brown was called at 4:15 p.m. by the in-charge nurse on duty and informed that Tupac Shakur had died. Ten minutes later, Doctor Brown arrived at the ICU building. He went straight to Tupac’s bedside to examine him. “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,” he wrote in his report. The doctor walked outside the room to interview Afeni Shakur for his report. When he was finished, Brown returned to Tupac’s private room. He tagged Tupac’s toe. With the help of a nurse, he placed Tupac’s nude body in a plastic body bag and sealed it with Coroner’s Seal No. 855971.

But Tupac’s body wasn’t taken through the front entrance of the trauma center. Hospital personnel didn’t want a mob
scene on their hands. Instead, according to a hospital security officer on duty that afternoon, Tupac’s body, on a gurney and in a body bag, was wheeled to the elevator banks in the trauma unit and taken upstairs, to the third floor. The guard said no one even noticed the gurney as attendants waited for the elevator doors to open. Once upstairs, Tupac’s body was wheeled down a hallway to a parking-lot exit at the back of the hospital. From the back parking lot, an unmarked mortuary van took his body to the medical examiner’s office three blocks away.

Meanwhile, upon being turned away, Suge walked toward the exit door and out of the trauma unit, unable to see Tupac one last time. He was followed by the same group of men he had arrived with. They all got into Suge’s Lexus and drove away. No one spoke. Gang officers on the street appeared relieved once Suge was gone.

Word began to circulate that the coroner had used the back entrance of the hospital to remove Tupac’s body. About the same time, Danny Boy walked to the front of the hospital to the driveway used by ambulances. He sat down on the curb with a friend and sobbed again. A crew member put his arm around him and comforted him. They stayed there for about 15 minutes.

Some of the fans who’d been keeping the hospital vigil left for the coroner’s office, where Tupac’s autopsy was about to begin.

“We had them [fans] at our back doors. We had them driving by. We had them calling. It got ridiculous,” said Ron Flud, who, at that point, had been the Clark County Coroner for 13 years and, before that, had been a cop with the North Las Vegas Police Department.

Besides fans, black ministers also knocked on the coroner’s office door. The coroner explained: “We had local ministers show up and say, ‘Suge wanted us here.’ First of all, as far as coming into the office, only the next of kin has any kind of control over the body. And the only reason you let them in is to identify the body. Tupac had already been identified
[by his mother]. We’re dealing with evidence, and we’re very protective as to who is going to be around. Nobody goes into the autopsy except who we control. There were requests to be there from all kinds of people – medical personnel, cops, firefighters. We said, ‘Why?’”

Flud, of course, would not let them or anyone else in, other than detectives and coroner’s office personnel. Allowing them in was against department policy.

Reporters and photographers, meanwhile, waited outside the trauma unit for more than two hours for the hospital spokesman, Dale Pugh, to issue an official statement that Tupac had died. The media had been telephoned by Dale’s office saying that Tupac had succumbed to his wounds and was dead. Reporters and photographers rushed to the hospital.

One of those waiting outside was Kevin Powell, a freelance rap journalist on assignment for
Rolling Stone
magazine. Kevin had befriended Tupac after interviewing him many times over several years. Powell looked sad as he stood by, notebook at his side, silently watching the group of mourners. Powell, a cast member on the MTV original series “The Real World” in 1992 and host and writer for MTV’s documentary “Straight From The Hood,” had earlier described Tupac as his friend and said he didn’t think Tupac was going to die. Powell called him tough, especially after surviving a shooting two years earlier in Manhattan. The Tupac Kevin knew was a fighter.

Reporters continued to wait, as they’re accustomed to doing at crime scenes, hospitals, and courtrooms. Finally, they were told that Dale Pugh wouldn’t be coming out after all. A hospital employee told me that Pugh felt he might be putting himself in danger by walking outside the hospital amid members of the press and waiting fans.

Pugh, however, later told me, “I never had a plan to come down and talk to the news media. Our decision was made. We knew how we were going to handle it if [Tupac] passed away. Our efforts were to
call
everyone in the press.
We’d had so many telephone calls concerning it. The media from around the world was calling, besides [receiving] calls from fans. The hospital was deluged with calls about Tupac.