Investigators May have turned a blind eye during Tupac’s murder investigation

By Kenneth Williams-

When Tupac Shakur  was shot on a Las Vegas street, one of the most potentially valuable witnesses was not standing somewhere across the road or hearing about the attack second-hand. He was in the car immediately behind the rapper’s BMW.

Frank Alexander was Shakur’s bodyguard and was driving the vehicle carrying members of the rapper’s entourage. Beside him was Malcolm Greenidge, a rapper who had known Shakur since childhood. As the two cars travelled along the Las Vegas Strip on the night of September 7, 1996, a white Cadillac pulled alongside Shakur’s BMW and gunfire erupted.

Tupac was hit four times. Marion “Suge” Knight, who was driving the BMW, was wounded but survived. The Cadillac disappeared into the night. What happened afterwards has become one of the most enduring questions surrounding the murder. Not simply who pulled the trigger, but why investigators did not move more aggressively to establish what the people travelling directly behind Shakur had actually seen.

The answer is complicated by a dispute that emerged between the witnesses and Las Vegas police. Alexander and Greenidge later said they had seen the attackers and had told investigators what they knew shortly after the shooting. Police said their accounts were inconsistent with statements recorded at the crime scene.That disagreement should have made a formal identification procedure more important, not less.

In a scenario where  a witness says he saw the attackers, the obvious investigative question is whether he can recognise them. If police believe his memory is unreliable, the answer is still to test it — promptly, systematically and independently — rather than allowing months to pass.

Yet it was not until March 1997, almost six months after Shakur was shot, that Las Vegas investigators travelled to Southern California to interview Alexander and Greenidge. By then, the opportunity for a fresh identification had substantially diminished.

Alexander was shown a collection of suspect photographs at an Orange County restaurant but could not identify the shooter. Greenidge told police he had not seen the gunman and did not want to view the photographs, according to Sgt. Kevin Manning of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. The result was presented as another dead end.

That conclusion obscures a more troubling question, which is why it took six months to reach the point at which police tested whether these witnesses could identify anyone at all? The contemporary record shows that the two men had publicly complained only weeks earlier that police had never asked them to view photographs of possible suspects.

Both men said they had told investigators what they had seen in the immediate aftermath of the shooting but had not subsequently been approached for an identification. Greenidge said he had seen four faces before the shooting.

”That claim was extraordinary if true., Cristina Vera  scholar and researcher international hip-hop studies, told The Eye Of Media.Com :”It did not mean he could identify the killer, but it meant investigators had a witness who believed he had seen the occupants of the attacking vehicle at close range. The proper response should have been urgency. Instead, the case became tangled in a dispute over credibility”.

Las Vegas police maintained that the witnesses’ later accounts differed from what they had said immediately after the shooting. The witnesses and members of Shakur’s entourage accused detectives of treating them as suspects rather than as potential witnesses and of failing to pursue obvious leads. Neither side’s version should simply be accepted without scrutiny.

Vera continued: ‘There is a basic investigative principle that cuts through the dispute. If police believe a witness has seen something important, they should preserve and test that evidence as quickly as possible.

‘Memory is not a piece of forensic evidence that remains unchanged in a drawer. It is vulnerable to time, publicity, conversations and suggestion. A witness who is asked to identify an unfamiliar face hours or days after a shooting is in a fundamentally different position from one who is asked six months later, after the victim’s murder has become a national story and the names of suspected gang members have circulated publicly.

‘The delay therefore matters even if the witnesses eventually failed to identify anyone.And there was another reason the witnesses deserved particular attention. The shooting did not occur in isolation. Only hours earlier, Shakur and members of his entourage had confronted and beaten Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson in the lobby of the MGM Grand. The confrontation was captured on hotel surveillance video. Anderson was a known member of the South Side Compton Crips.

”Las Vegas detectives initially dismissed the possibility that the confrontation was connected to the shooting. Police had reviewed the surveillance footage but did not initially know Anderson’s identity or the significance of his gang affiliation. Los Angeles-area gang investigators did.

When Compton gang investigators subsequently reviewed the footage, they recognised Anderson and told Las Vegas investigators that they believed members of the South Side Crips were responsible for the shooting and that Anderson could be the gunman,

‘Investigators did not need proof at that stage. They needed a theory worth testing. Anderson had been attacked by Shakur’s group. Shakur was shot roughly two hours later. The suspected attackers were believed to have been members of a rival gang. Information was coming out of Compton that implicated Anderson.

Against that backdrop, the people in the vehicle behind Shakur potentially represented a crucial bridge between the confrontation at the MGM Grand and the shooting on the Las Vegas Strip They had seen the attack. They had followed Shakur. They were present when the white Cadillac appeared. They could potentially describe the people inside it. Yet the investigation did not immediately exploit that opportunity. The same pattern appears elsewhere in the case.

Compton investigators were receiving tips that pointed towards Anderson and other South Side Crips. They possessed knowledge of the gang members involved and understood the relationships between the people appearing in the MGM Grand footage.

Then, on October 2, 1996, Anderson was arrested during a huge law-enforcement operation in Compton. Two Las Vegas detectives were present. Anderson was therefore physically within reach of investigators pursuing Shakur’s murder. One detective questioned him for roughly 20 minutes.

Compton investigators were astonished that the Las Vegas detectives did not take the opportunity to question other gang members who were also in custody and who local officers believed might have information about Shakur’s killinng

That episode exposes the central weakness of the investigation: the people who understood the Compton gang environment and the detectives investigating the Las Vegas murder were not operating with the same sense of urgency.

Las Vegas police later argued that their detectives lacked authority to interrogate suspects on California soil. Los Angeles authorities disputed that explanation, saying local police had invited the detectives to participate and that there was no legal barrier to questioning the men. whatever the jurisdictional dispute, the opportunity disappeared. Anderson was released.

Anderson  was never charged with Shakur’s murder, but was killed in Compton in 1998.The witness issue therefore cannot be separated from the broader question of what investigators were doing with the information they were receiving. The police had surveillance footage.A law-enforcement officer recognised Anderson. Compton investigators were pointing towards the South Side Crips.

Tips were arriving from the streets. And there were people travelling directly behind Tupac who said they had seen the attackers. These strands were not rapidly woven together into a single, aggressive investigation. One of the most revealing aspects of the contemporary reporting is that the dispute was not simply between police and Shakur’s family. Law-enforcement figures themselves questioned the way the case was being handled.

Investigators familiar with gang homicides, who argued that successful gang investigations depended heavily on cultivating informants and repeatedly pressing gang members for information. One experienced gang investigator described relentless follow-up as essential. That criticism goes to the heart of the matter.

Gang murders are rarely solved simply by waiting for an ordinary witness to walk into a police station and name the gunman. Investigators have to understand the people involved, establish relationships with informants, cross-check rumours, interrogate suspects and return repeatedly to witnesses whose first accounts may be incomplete.

The Tupac investigation appears to have struggled precisely in those areas.. There a one danger in retrospect. It would be wrong to say that Alexander would certainly have identified the killer had police shown him photographs immediately. When he eventually saw a photo collection in March 1997, he could not identify the shooter.

Researcher Jason Matthews told The Eye Of Media: ” Had Alexander been shown properly assembled photographs or placed through an appropriate identification procedure in the days immediately following the shooting, perhaps he would have identified the assailant, nobody, or even the wrong person.

We will never know because the opportunity was allowed to age. By the time the police finally conducted the photographic exercise, the case had already become surrounded by rumour, competing theories and intense media attention.

The failure was therefore not necessarily that police failed to obtain an identification. It was that they failed to establish early enough whether an identification was possible. A murder investigation is a race against disappearing evidence.

Witnesses move away. Memories fade. Surveillance recordings are overwritten. Suspects change their stories. People who know what happened die. The Tupac case suffered all of those losses.

Yafeu “Kadafi” Fula, another member of Shakur’s entourage who was present in Las Vegas after the shooting, was killed two months later. Investigators had reportedly failed to conduct a substantive follow-up interview with him during the week Shakur remained in hospital. Anderson himself was dead less than two years after Shakur.

Other alleged participants also died and potential surveillance evidence disappeared. The case slowly lost the people and evidence that might have allowed investigators to reconstruct that September night while memories were still fresh.

Nearly three decades later, Duane “Keffe D” Davis has finally been convicted of murder in connection with Shakur’s death. Prosecutors argued that Davis helped orchestrate the killing in retaliation for the MGM Grand confrontation. But Davis’s conviction does not establish who physically fired the fatal shots. That question remains central to the history of the case.

Keffu D Davis was eventually convicted for orchestrating the murder of Tupac Shakur

And it casts the handling of the early witnesses in a different light.The man driving directly behind Tupac was not an obscure bystander discovered years later. He was part of Shakur’s own security detail. He was there at the precise moment the white Cadillac pulled alongside the BMW. He told police what he believed he had seen.

Whether he could have identified the killer is unknowable now.What is knowable is that investigators did not establish that immediately. That may be the enduring lesson of the Tupac investigation.

The missed opportunity was not necessarily one dramatic decision that allowed a murderer to escape. It was a series of smaller decisions — to wait, to doubt, to rely on one agency’s assessment rather than another’s, to regard a witness as less useful than he might have been, to leave gang investigators at arm’s length and to allow potentially valuable evidence to disappear.

Any one of those decisions might have made little difference.Together, they helped turn a murder committed in front of witnesses and amid a city saturated with surveillance cameras into a case that remained unresolved for a generation.

Th question is no longer whether police had enough information to guarantee an arrest in 1996. They plainly did not. The harder question is whether they had enough information to do more than they did. The evidence suggests they did. And for a murder investigation, sometimes the difference between solving a case and losing it forever is not the evidence police never had. It is the evidence they had — and failed to pursue while there was still time.