Hip-hop’s rocky relationship and trust issues with the police have been well documented over the course of its almost 40 year history. So it should come as no surprise that one of hip-hop’s most beloved sons, Tupac Shakur, was uncooperative with authorities, even as he lay fatally wounded on a Las Vegas street.
Former Las Vegas police officer Chris Carroll recently sat down with Vegas Seven to discuss his experience as the first responding officer on the scene that fateful night. Carroll says that when he first happened upon Shakur at the scene of the shooting, he seemed preoccupied with yelling at Suge Knight instead of responding to the officer:
So I’m looking at Tupac, and he’s trying to yell back at Suge, and I’m asking him, ‘Who shot you? What happened? Who did it?’ And he was just kind of ignoring me. He was making eye contact with me here and there, but he’s trying to yell at Suge. And I kept asking over and over, ‘Who did this? Who shot you?’ And he basically kept ignoring me. And then I saw in his face, in his movements, all of a sudden in the snap of a finger, he changed. And he went from struggling to speak, being noncooperative, to an ‘I’m at peace’ type of thing. Just like that.
Carroll goes on to recall Tupac’s final words as he began “gurgling and slipping out of consciousness”:
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: ‘F— you.’
Read Carroll’s full interview here.
