Tupac’s last words to Suge Knight were ‘You the one they shot in the head’, police files hidden for 24 years reveal
FATALLY injured Tupac Shakur remained conscious and believed his pal Suge Knight was the one badly injured - not him - after being gunned down, according to bombshell police files cops have tried to keep hidden for 24 years.
Right after the drive-by shooting Tupac told Suge: “You the one they shot in the head. You shot in the head.”
Tupac was apparently unaware that he had sustained life threatening injuries but instead was concerned for the Death Row Records boss, Suge told cops at the time.
Suge, who claims he jumped on top of the rapper during the attack to try and protect him, realized his friend was badly injured and vowed he would get him to the hospital - but drove in the wrong direction to the hospital before smashing into a divider at traffic intersection, according to the police records.
Tupac slipped into a coma, never to wake up again.
Suge detailed the events of the shooting to Las Vegas police in an interview three days after the shooting.
The transcript of the interview appears in 243 pages of never before released documents, obtained by The Sun.
The notorious rap mogul painted a terrifying and grim picture of the final moments of Tupac as the pair cruised along Las Vegas Boulevard on September 7 1996.
As they drove, rap music blaring, along Las Vegas Boulevard they stopped at a red light.
“We was having conversation," Suge told cops. "We heard some gunshots. We looked to the right of us. Tupac was like tryin’ to get to the back seat.
“I grabbed him and pulled him down. It was about 15 gun shots. They hit my head. I grabbed him pulled him down.”
Suge, who suffered bullet abrasions on his shoulder, neck and chest, insisted that neither he nor Tupac yelled at the shooters, did anything to rile them nor knew them, according to the transcript.
He told police: “Everything happened so fast”, but the attack was “too long”, and repeated : “I grabbed him pulled him down and topped him.
“I thought I got shot in my head, which I did.”
As he fell out his car Suge “waved at officers and cabs and everybody told me to get down.”
Suge told cops he "almost got shot a second time" when he was "tryin' to find the hospital" and "got out and flagged down the officer and ambulance and then [redacted] the barrel of a gun."
He added: “All I know I had blood gushin’ on my head.”
When asked if he was aware he was "driving away" from all the hospitals, Suge replied "No, Sir."
Suge expressed his anger at Tupac’s bodyguards, which included the star’s cousin and brother, who were following behind them in a black Lexus, during the interview.
Asked by police what the security team did to save them, he replied: “Your guess is as good as mine. The guy gets paid a lot of money to be protection. I don’t understand it to this day.
"This is one of the reasons Tupac and myself was more comfortable because we knew we had Tupac’s bodyguards behind this. That is the idea for them.”
Suge then shot down reports that Tupac was carrying a gun in the front seat, saying: “I don’t allow the artist people around me to carry weapons.”
In the same documents police claim that their investigation "met problems" early on because nobody in Tupac's entourage provided any useful information.
They wrote: "It took three days to get "Suge" Knight in for an interview. He arrived with three attorneys in tow. Knight provided no information to aid our investigation."
In his “voluntary statement”, Suge claimed he never saw the murderers, their car or had any reason to believe the West Coast rap pair were targets - despite them both being involved in a fight with Orlando Anderson - widely believed to be Tupac's killer - just hours earlier.
Detective Becker, who was leading the probe for the Las Vegas Metro Police, was often met with a series of short "Yes" and "No" answers during their question and answer session on September 11 - and the detective noted in the files that Suge had failed to meet with him several times to conduct the taped interview.
Suge also denied that the murder was part of the long running East and West Coast rap wars, which escalated into gang violence during the 1990s.
Asked why Tupac was gunned down, Suge said: “I don’t understand it to this day.”
In the interview Suge, then aged 31, boasted about Death Row Records’ success hinting that other labels were “jealous.”
He said: “All labels target Death Row because we sell more records" adding that his competitors “want to be recognized.”
The 31 page transcript, which has many redacted or blanked out passages, was just one of the explosive files obtained by The Sun on Wednesday.
Other allegations in the 243 page filing include that Suge Knight was the intended target for the Tupac "hit".
According to another transcript, a witness named Gregory Johnson told police in a jail house interview that a fellow inmate - whose name is redacted - told him he went to Vegas to carry out a "hit" on Suge because he allegedly "put a contract on to... have every Crip in Compton killed and some people got hit".
Johnson added: "He either said [they] bombed on...Tupac and them or ...dropped on them, but he was kind of disappointed that he wasn't able to...blast Suge."
The Sun reached out to an attorney for Suge for comment on these allegations.
The file release comes after The Sun revealed a former LAPD detective, who worked on the Tupac murder case, urged Vegas cops to arrest gangster Keffe D over the rapper's death - calling him a "self-confessed murderer".
Greg Kading says that Las Vegas police are aware of Keffe D Davis, 56, who has admitted to cops, on documentaries and in a book, that his nephew Orlando shot Tupac and that he was an accomplice, and simply need to arrest him. Keffe has never been charged in connection with the murder.
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The documents were released after Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department was sued by the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2017 for refusing to hand them over.
An agreement was eventually reached that the department would release 1400 redacted files related to the case.
It's not known if the 243 pages obtained by The Sun via a Nevada Public Records Request are the entirety of the files, or if more are still to become available.