By Aaron Miller
The murder of Tupac Shakur was treated as one of America’s great unsolved crimes for over 30 years, but the evidence now emerging from the case raises a more uncomfortable question than who killed the rapper.
That is how much did investigators know in the days and weeks after the shooting, and why did they fail to act on some of their most promising leads?
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The answer is not that police had nothing to work with. Far from it.Within days of Shakur being shot on a Las Vegas street, investigators had been told that Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, a member of the South Side Compton Crips, could be connected to the killing.
Anderson had been involved in a violent confrontation with Shakur and members of his entourage inside the MGM Grand earlier that night, just hours before the shooting. There was also surveillance footage of that confrontation.What happened next became one of the most consequential missed opportunities in the investigation.
Las Vegas police initially reviewed the hotel footage, but did not know who the man being beaten was, or why the incident might matter. A senior homicide commander publicly said there was no reason to believe the altercation was connected to the shooting and suggested Anderson may simply have been an unknown man who had crossed paths with Shakur.
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But Los Angeles-area gang investigators, which are part of the Californian Gang Investigators Association , saw something very different.About a week after the shooting, Compton gang investigators reviewed the same MGM Grand footage.
They identified the man being attacked as Anderson, explained his connection to the South Side Compton Crips and identified the gang affiliations of members of Shakur’s entourage.Bobby Ladd, then a homicide investigator with the Compton gang unit, later said his team told Las Vegas police that they believed the South Side Crips were responsible and that Anderson was the likely shooter.
That should have been a moment when the investigation changed direction, but it did not.Instead, Las Vegas investigators continued to regard the MGM Grand fight as largely irrelevant.
Anderson was not immediately tracked down for a detailed interview about the shooting, and police did not show his photograph to members of Shakur’s entourage who were still in Las Vegas while the dying rapper remained in hospital. In hindsight, that decision is difficult to defend.
It does not mean Anderson was automatically guilty. A man appearing in a surveillance video of an earlier fight is not, by itself, proof that he later committed murder.What it means is that it was very rcckless to overlook its potential relevance.
Anderson denied involvement in Shakur’s killing and was never charged with it. The relevant question is why police did not do much better with their investigation of a serious murder case?
Police were not being asked to convict Anderson on the basis of a hotel video. They were being presented with a lead that could be investigated. And the circumstances surrounding that lead were extraordinary. The confrontation had taken place only hours before Shakur was ambushed. Anderson was a known gang member.
His identity had been established by investigators who specialised in Compton gangs. And police were being told that the shooting could have been a retaliation for the beating. That was more than enough to justify serious follow-up, but investigating cops woefully failed.
Orlando baby Anderson killed Tupac but police failed to nail him down
Instead, the investigation appears to have suffered from a damaging divide between the Las Vegas detectives handling the murder ,and the Los Angeles-area officers who understood the gang world surrounding the suspects.
The Compton gang squad had something Las Vegas investigators badly needed, and that was local knowledge. Gang investigators knew the people involved, understood the rivalries and knew how information moved through the streets. They also understood that conventional homicide interviews were unlikely to be enough in a case involving organised street gangs, reluctant witnesses and a culture of silence.
Yet when an opportunity arose to exploit that expertise, it was not fully used. On October 2, 1996, less than a month after Shakur’s murder, Compton police, federal agents and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies carried out a major gang sweep in Compton. Anderson was among those arrested, although the arrest related to an unrelated warrant.
Suddenly, one of the men whom Compton investigators believed might be connected to Shakur’s murder was sitting in a police lock-up.Two Las Vegas detectives were present.One questioned Anderson for about 20 minutes.
Murdered: Tupac Shakur’s murder was poorly investigated for years Inage: true colours. org
And then, according to the Los Angeles Times’ investigation into the case, the opportunity largely ended there. Compton officers suggested that the Las Vegas detectives question other gang members being held, but the suggestion was brushed aside.
Compton investigators were reportedly stunned because they believed some of those men could have known what happened or could have been involved. That is perhaps the most difficult episode in the early investigation to explain.
The argument later offered by Las Vegas police was that their detectives were operating outside Nevada and did not have authority to interrogate the suspects. But Los Angeles authorities disputed that interpretation, saying the detectives had been invited to participate and could have questioned the men.
There was also a disagreement over what Las Vegas police actually asked local investigators to do. Las Vegas officials said they asked sheriff’s investigators to question gang members and pass along anything they learned. The sheriff’s investigators said they were not specifically asked to interrogate the suspects about Shakur’s murder. Whatever the legal and jurisdictional arguments, the practical result was the same.
The people who might have known what happened were not subjected to the relentless follow-up that experienced gang investigators believed the case required.That failure becomes even more striking when the witnesses are considered.
Two men travelling in a vehicle directly behind Tupac’s BMW told the Los Angeles Times in February 1997 that they had seen the attackers. Malcolm Greenridge, a member of Shakur’s former rap group, said he saw four Black men in a white Cadillac immediately before the shooting and had seen their faces, although he could not say which man fired the weapon.
Frank Alexander, Shakur’s bodyguard and the driver of the vehicle behind Tupac, said he caught a brief glimpse of the shooter and believed he might be able to identify him.
Yet neither man had been shown photographs of suspects or brought into a formal identification procedure, according to their accounts.This is where the investigation’s credibility took another blow. Las Vegas police had repeatedly complained that witnesses were refusing to cooperate.
But here were witnesses saying they were willing to cooperate — and saying nobody had asked them to identify anyone. Police disputed their account, saying the statements they had given on the night of the shooting were inconsistent with what they later told the newspaper. But even that dispute highlights the missed opportunity.
If investigators believed the witnesses were unreliable, the obvious response was not to abandon the lead. It was to interview them again, test their accounts, compare their descriptions and, where legally appropriate, conduct an identification procedure. Instead, the dispute was allowed to become another dead end. There was another potentially devastating loss: surveillance evidence.
Surveillance Systems
Las Vegas is one of the most heavily monitored cities in America, and casino surveillance systems covered hotel lobbies, corridors, parking areas and other public spaces. Yet investigators failed to secure additional footage that might have tracked Anderson and others after the MGM Grand physical confrontation.
Gang investigators also believed Anderson and associates had appeared on cameras as they moved between the Treasure Island and MGM Grand hotels and later collected the white Cadillac from the Treasure Island valet area. That footage was not secured in time and was eventually overwritten.
The significance of that lost evidence cannot be known. It may not have shown a murder. It may not even have provided a clear identification. But it might have answered questions investigators spent decades trying to resolve.
Like where Anderson went after the fight, when the white Cadillac arrived, and whether the vehicle’s movements corresponded with the later shooting. Those were questions worth answering when the evidence was still available.
Instead, time erased the opportunities, and the final irony is that Anderson himself would never live to see the case resolved. He was killed in Compton in May 1998 in a shooting that police said was unrelated to Shakur’s murder, but was gang related.
He was never charged with Tupac’s killing. Decades later, the case finally produced a conviction — but not because investigators had managed to build the case against Anderson in 1996. Rather because Anderson’s uncle foolishly shot himself on the foot, and exposed himself by too much for too long.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, Anderson’s uncle and a former South Side Compton Crips leader, was convicted in Las Vegas on August 31, 2026 of murder in connection with Shakur’s killing.
Prosecutors successfully argued that Davis orchestrated the attack as retaliation for the MGM Grand beating. Davis was not accused of being the gunman, but prosecutors argued that his role in organising the killing made him criminally responsible.
The conviction was built largely around Davis’s own later statements, interviews and memoir rather than the kind of forensic case investigators might have developed in 1996.
Duane Davis wrote a book admitting to orchestrating the murder of Tupac Shakur Steve Marcus/Pool Photo via AP)
The verdict provides a legal conclusion about Davis’s responsibility. It does not erase the investigative failures that preceded it, nor does it prove that every early suspicion about Anderson was correct.
Viewed objectively, police had ample reason to take the Anderson lead seriously.A fellow law-enforcement officer recognised him in surveillance footage. Compton gang investigators identified him and immediately connected him to the gang environment surrounding the case.
Witnesses in the vehicle behind Tupac said they had seen the attackers. Anderson was subsequently sitting in a Compton police lock-up while Las Vegas detectives were present.
Potential surveillance footage existed that might have followed the suspects after the hotel confrontation. None of those facts alone proves that police could have solved the murder.
Together, they show that investigators had opportunities that deserved far more aggressive follow-up. The greatest criticism, therefore, is not that police failed to arrest Anderson on the spot. They could not responsibly have done that simply because his face appeared in a hotel video.The criticism is that they appear to have been too quick to decide that he was irrelevant.
Once that judgement was made, other evidence was viewed through the same lens. The gang investigators’ warning was discounted. The opportunity to question Anderson and other gang members was not fully exploited.
Witnesses were not promptly taken through identification procedures. Potential surveillance evidence was allowed to disappear. The tragedy is that investigations are often won or lost not by one dramatic discovery, but by what detectives choose to do with the first credible lead. In Tupac Shakur’s case, the first lead was there almost immediately.
The question that will remain long after the 2026 conviction is whether the murder really needed to remain unsolved for nearly three decades — or whether, in those first critical weeks, police simply failed to follow the evidence that was already sitting in front of them.
The Los Angelis LAPD were contacted for comment
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