The Las Vegas police officer who was the first to respond to the fatal shooting of Tupac Shakur in September 1996 has revealed the slain rapper’s final words. They were … “fuck you.”
In a pretty good read from Vegas Seven, Chris Carroll, a sergeant on the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s bike patrol unit on the Sunset Strip, recalls the events that transpired that evening of September 7, from the buildup of the Mike Tyson fight that drew Tupac to Nevada, to the shooting that killed him at the age of 25.
The rapper died in Carroll’s arms, but not before the cop pulled a profusely bleeding Tupac out of his car and tried to get answers of who was behind the shooting. Carroll says he asked Tupac several times “Who shot you?” but Tupac replied “fuck you” before slipping out of consciousness. He died several days later.
From Vegas Seven:
“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.
“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. At that point, an ambulance showed up, and he went into unconsciousness.
Damn. And there’s a reason why Carroll, who is now retired, waited nearly 20 years to tell his story.
As for Carroll, he gives two reasons for waiting so long to go public with his account of the night Shakur was shot. First, his retirement from Metro has given him the freedom to tell his story without possible reprimand. “There’s still an open homicide case,” he says. “It just wasn’t time to speak earlier. Now it’s been almost 18 years; there’s clearly never going to be a court case on this.
“The second main reason I didn’t go public with this before is I didn’t want Tupac to be a martyr or hero because he told the cops ‘Fuck you.’ I didn’t want to give him that. I didn’t want people to say, ‘Even when the chips were down, his life on the line, he still said “Fuck you,” he still wouldn’t talk to the police.’ I didn’t want him to be a hero for that. And now enough time has passed, well, he’s a martyr anyway; he’s viewed as a hero anyway. My story, at this point, isn’t going to change any of that.”
Before and after his death, Tupac has sold more than 75 million records worldwide, and was resurrected two years ago for a hologram performance at the Coachella Music & Arts Festival in Indio, California.