these are the exact words of Chris Carroll,a retired sergeant with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department( the last person Tupac spoke to)..."He looked at me, and he took a breath to get the words out, and he opened his mouth.."And then the words came out: 'F**k you.'"
Shakur was shot multiple times on September 7th, 1996. After leaving a
boxing match with former Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight, the rapper
and his bodyguards got into a scuffle with 21-year-old Crips gang member
Orlando Anderson in the lobby of the MGM Grand casino. Carroll, who
worked with the city's bike patrol unit, had also been watching the same
Mike Tyson fight, but was unaware of the brawl taking place in the
lobby.
Later, a white Cadillac pulled up beside Knight and Shakur
while they were stopped at a traffic light and one man began shooting
out of the back window. Carroll was the first officer to respond to the
grisly scene.
"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 f**k 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, 'F**ker, 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."
Carroll says
when he finally was able to open the door, Shakur's limp body fell out
of the vehicle, "like he was leaning against the door."
"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."
Carroll
says he attempted to get a "dying declaration" of a potential suspect
from Shakur, but the rapper was ignoring him at first.
"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 noncooperative, 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: 'F**k you.' After that, he
started gurgling and slipping out of consciousness."
So why is
Carroll coming forward with with information in 2014? Two reasons:
Retiring from the Metro has allowed him the freedom to speak about the
homicide case without being reprimanded ("It's been almost 18 years," he
says. There's clearly never going to be a court case on this."), and he
also didn't want "Tupac to be a martyr or a hero because he told the
cops 'F**k you.'"
Carroll says Shakur never spoke another word --
remaining silent even when another officer tried to draw out a
declaration in the ambulance.
"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."
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