Changes

by Sheldon Pearce

  It was just a very eerie reality. On the third day, the marketing director walked up and was like, “They’re going to come finish him off. They just called the Row, they’re coming.” That’s when I called Vegas PD to get them to send troops. I called the cops to try to get the cops to come to the hospital and they were like, “Should something happen, there’s a foot patrolman in the hospital. We’re a little understaffed right now.” The security guard started laughing. He told me there was a rodeo star that had broken a leg the year before; they gave him four policemen around the clock and six honey wagons for his family to be comfortable.

  CATHY SCOTT It was confusing during that week, and the weeks to follow, because we were not getting the facts straight from the police. So I talked to Compton PD almost immediately and then found out that they had intelligence from the street. Then I go back to the [Vegas] police and say, “Well, this is what I know.” No, we don’t know about that. No, we’re not in touch with them. No, it was unrelated. It almost felt like a cover-up at the time.

  GOBI RAHIMI Pac was in an induced coma almost the entire time that he was out of surgery. I sort of volunteered for the twelve-to-eight-in-the-morning shift at the hospital, because it just didn’t seem like anyone was there protecting him during that time. They had posted up a Death Row guy, but you know, I didn’t trust them. Each night, it would be me inside the ER waiting room—I figured I’d be the last line of defense—and then one or two of the Outlawz would be outside, posted up in the car, and, after the fact, I learned that they had gats with them, and they were ready to blast anyone who came in.

  DR. JOHN FILDES I was briefed that on the night of the injury there were a significant number of very, very concerned people who came to the hospital. I was briefed that helping them deal with this unexpected injury, and de-escalating any emotional or angry feelings that they had, was a central part of the evening. If you look in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, they actually have photos of candlelight vigils being held outside the trauma center.

  CATHY SCOTT The trauma unit was at the emergency entrance to the rear of the hospital. It was lined with cars. They’d stand on top of the rooftops, his music would be blaring, and they’d have boom boxes. A lot of people came, but it was mostly Black people from the west side paying their respects and trying to figure out if it was okay, hanging outside. They’d watch when a doctor would come out and talk to the media.

  DR. JOHN FILDES I would tell you that that level of media attention is not uncommon for people who practice in the area of trauma. I made myself available daily, and as often as required to discuss his conditions. So there really was, from our side, we went out of our way to create a flow of information that was appropriate for the circumstance.

  GOBI RAHIMI This fat white nurse will come out and give me progress reports. And I think it was the second night or third night she came out, and she said, you know, “That Pac of yours is a fighter.” She said, “We’ve had to put him in an induced coma because each time he comes to he tries to pull those plugs out and get out of bed.” She said when you’re a gunshot victim, when you become conscious, you wake up at the scene of the crime.

  I didn’t go in and see him, for whatever reason, until the fifth night. The same nurse finally came to me like, “Baby, you’ve been sitting here all these nights, how come you haven’t gone to spend some time with him?” And so I got up and went in. It was a horrific sight. His head was twice the size of normal; I guess he had water on the brain. It was just cloaked with a sheet, and everywhere that he had a bullet wound had a patch of gauze. I went up and put my hand on his arm, said a little prayer, and walked out.

  CATHY SCOTT The trauma unit always had a uniformed guard inside its lobby. Afeni had said that she would be the one to decide who could go and visit, and even Kidada couldn’t go in whenever she wanted to. He was in grave condition. His body crashed during the week and they did surgery.

  GOBI RAHIMI So I’d heard that his popsV was coming into town, and he came into town straight to the hospital with his luggage. He didn’t have a place to stay. At that point—the third night or the fourth night—Tracy had left. Tracy couldn’t take it anymore. She asked me to come back to LA with her. I was like, “No, I’m staying.” She sort of had a meltdown. And every so often she would go into this, “My people, my people, they kill themselves, they’re killing each other.” And she bounced.

  So I had a room with the hospital, and since I was doing the graveyard shift, I was like, you know, “I’ll take you, Billy, and you can kind of stay in my room, at least for the night.” That same day, Kevin HackieVI came into town. He was all wigged out because Vegas PD had stopped him in the airport, and then took his gun and his badge and said he didn’t have any jurisdiction in Vegas. So he’s all wigged out as to how they knew he was going to be there. He needed a place to stay, so I sort of put the two of them in the room together.

  I’ve heard varying accounts on his credibility, but he sort of divulged to us that he was an undercover FBI agent at that point. Then he whipped out a card and he said, “I’m working on a case against Suge and Death Row for money laundering and drug racketeering,” or something like that.

  DR. JOHN FILDES The kind of gunshot wound that he had is immediately fatal for most people, and for those people who survive the surgery—a surgery that required removal of a lung—80 percent of them don’t survive. Those are the precise numbers from the literature.

  CATHY SCOTT There was a sense of not knowing, and there was a sense of worry, but there was also a sense of hope that he was still alive and he was going to make it. You have to make it past the seventh day. He made it past the first. And the third is bad, especially for a chest injury—he passed that. And I talked to a doctor who said the seventh day is another integral moment. If you make it past that, then he’s got a chance.

  MARK ANTHONY NEAL The thing that I remember most about the shooting—and a lot of folks who were paying attention at the time, it surprised no one that, you know, he stayed alive for another week. It was just something about his spirit and his nature. We talked about him, you know, broadly, as kind of a warrior. It wasn’t a surprise that he fought to stay alive for so long.

  DR. JOHN FILDES In the pathology reports, and the coroner’s reports, which were leaked, it says that he had a gunshot wound through the pulmonary hilum. It’s nearly immediately fatal in more than 90 percent of people, and [among] the small number who survive surgery, 80 percent of the patients who undergo pneumonectomy die. It’s a bad injury. The fact that he got off the OR table and our critical care teams, through some very sophisticated ventilator strategies, and some very careful cardiac strategies, were able to bridge him for several days… He survived that injury better than any other patient in my thirty-year career.

  CATHY SCOTT But they couldn’t stop the bleeding in his chest, and that’s what killed him. It just kept ripping open.

  DR. LEON PACHTER All the people that I knew, the guys that look to him for their rap music in the hospital, say, “Oh, you think if he was here, you could have saved him?” I said, “You know, maybe? I don’t know.”

  In New York, I think he was shot by a .22; I remember that it was a lower-caliber bullet. If it had been a .45 or a nine-millimeter, or even something bigger than that, he would have had major, major injury. The report said it was like a twelve-doctor team; a lot of that is hyperbole. It could be a team of about four, five, six; I don’t know about twelve.

  DR. JOHN FILDES Now, there were a lot of people who wanted to have a philosophical discussion or get into a series of what-ifs, which really is not productive. And those people may have been disappointed. There was a desire for a lot of people to get into hypotheticals. I would say, “He’s in stable but critical condition,” and people would interpret “stable” as “He’s going to be fine.” I can’t help how people interpret the information when the information is given in a very clinical and accurate way. So you can only imagine all of the terrible things that you’ll see on the n
ews that affect individuals anywhere, and the emotions and the desire for a favorable outcome temper how people think, speak, and interpret things.

  He was very unstable. The clinical course of a patient who was forced to have a lung removed as a lifesaving measure after trauma is a fairly predictable pathway. And that pathway leads to poor pulmonary function, and eventually, heart failure. It’s a well-documented course. He was young and strong, so he lasted longer than most. The same words I’m saying to you were said to the family. I painstakingly presented all the information, to be fair to Tupac and fair to them.

  CATHY SCOTT That last day, you could just tell by the hospital staff what had happened. I remember one of his young backup singers came out and then just collapsed on the curb and just sobbed. Kevin Powell looked like he’d just lost his best friend. Nobody talked. Nobody was talking to each other. But you could hear his music playing from the street.

  RYAN D ROLLINS Days passed, and then somebody close to the situation called me and told me that he’d died that morning, and then it came on Channel 2 news immediately afterward. I remember thinking it was weird. I just knew in a minute we were gonna hook back up. I’d come down to Hollywood or wherever he was. I was still getting messages from him every now and then. I was just like, Wow, it’s over that quick.

  CATHY SCOTT When he died, I was at the hospital. Like two weeks earlier, the Las Vegas Sun had just launched its website. The Las Vegas Review-Journal did not [have one]. I think one or two TV stations had websites coming out. We were up and running, not knowing this was going to happen. So I was at the hospital with my radio that went straight to the newsroom and to the news desk, and Tupac was pronounced dead while I was there. Kevin Powell was there, too. He looked like the whole world had just ended. There’s a video of me where Suge Knight is walking past me. And he’s going into the trauma center because he had been told to get to the hospital. And when he got there, it was too late. We waited and waited. We knew it was coming, so I was writing the story. I was interviewing people—I got a comment from the hospital—and I was just waiting for the final word. And I phoned it in to the news desk. We were the first to report his death. The hits on the website shut it down.

  KHALIL KAIN I was on this show called Lush Life—it was me and Lori Petty, Karyn Parsons, and John Ortiz; it lasted like six episodes—when Pac passed. And Lori Petty was the one who told me, because he was in the hospital. I was always of the attitude telling everybody, like, “Fuck, it’s fine, man. Apparently bullets don’t bother him.”

  I was on my mark. We were setting up a closer. It was a Halloween episode that we were shooting. Lori came up from behind the camera and she was like, “Your boy just died.” I was like… What? “I just heard on the news: Pac just passed away.” We were on the Warner Bros. lot, on the soundstage. I walked right off the set. I sat down outside the door on the soundstage and just cried my eyes out. When that happens, you understand that that whole period of your life has been marked.

  CATHY SCOTT One of the best things I did that first week was I knew from the police and from the mortuary that his body was taken from the morgue rather quickly to the mortuary from the coroner’s office, which meant his coroner’s report was complete. I just walked into the coroner’s office. And they’ve always recognized me from the paper, and I said, “I’m looking for the coroner’s report on Lesane Crooks.” By that point it was on the news release but I did not say “Tupac.” I did it purposely. His mother never legally changed it.

  The woman handed me the report for a $5 fee and then I got back to the newsroom. It was just some clerk at the front desk. And I’m holding my breath the entire time. Because I was just dying to get more information from the report to say what killed him, where he was shot. I was not getting very good stuff. The hospital was kind of spotty. I was in the newsroom for about five minutes when she called me back and said, “We made a mistake. I shouldn’t have given that to you, because it’s an open investigation. Would you return it?”

  I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t.” I got that autopsy report almost immediately, because I knew the police were just shutting down everything.

  Tupac was the underdog. He was the victim. It’s a shame that he died the way he did and the police department didn’t care enough to try to solve it.

  GREG KADING In 2006, the city of Los Angeles is facing a civil lawsuit, which was based on some claims that there were rogue LAPD cops involved in the murder of Biggie Smalls. And then there was a comprehensive cover-up to protect those rogue cops. So those are the allegations that led to the lawsuit that led to a reinvestigation of Biggie’s murder.

  Well, that’s how it all started, with Biggie and trying to figure out what actually happened with him and whether any of these allegations were true. And then, you know, we always knew that there was a likely connection back to Tupac, because that just made instinctive sense. From September 1996, there was always kind of collaboration and sharing of information between Las Vegas and Compton, Las Vegas and LAPD, and anything that they thought was potentially relevant to their homicide investigation out there in Nevada. So there was a lot of sharing information back in those early days.

  When I got involved in 2006, we already had all of that material, we knew what information had been shared, what different approaches they took in their investigation, what Las Vegas thought, and that there will always be some common denominator at some point between the murders.

  We ultimately stumble upon a guy named Keefe D who is a Crip that we knew was associated with Bad Boy. We also knew that he was there that night Biggie was killed. There were claims that he had been doing security for Bad Boy, and that there was an outstanding debt owed to him and his crew. And then perhaps Biggie’s murder was in retaliation for that unpaid debt. He was a person of interest, if not a suspect.

  We also knew that Orlando Anderson, Keefe D’s nephew, had gotten into a fight with Tupac in Las Vegas. So he had the motive and the means to kill Pac. So that was the most obvious explanation for Pac’s murder. Once we get Keefe D in an interview room—and we’ve got him under very compelling circumstances, where it’s in his best interest to tell the truth—he revealed that, “Hey, I can’t tell you anything about Biggie’s murder, because we didn’t do it, but I can tell you about what happened to Pac, because we did do that.”

  When Mark Anthony Bell was beat up,VII the person in his face in that assault was Tupac. “Tell us where that bitch lives, motherfucker, we’ll beat your ass.” That was Pac. So when Mark Anthony Bell goes and tells Puffy, “Man, these dudes are after you and they’re after you bad, and Pac is all down for it…,” [Puffy] knew that Suge had kidnapped a guy and was basically threatening to kill him if he didn’t tell Suge and his goons where Puffy lived. Puffy was legitimately in fear for his life, and he realized that if you come to LA, you got a target on your back, and, you know, you either do a preemptive strike or you suffer the consequences of getting caught slipping.

  His first step was, Well, I just got to get some people around me that I feel can be my first line of defense should Suge and his crew come snooping around. I need guys like [Suge]. So he gets some Crips. It just so happened by mere fortuitous fate that he was very close to this guy named Zip, who was a Harlem dope dealer. He was getting his dope from a Crip out in Los Angeles named Keefe D. So when Puffy started to complain to Zip about his problems, saying, “LA is a problem. Suge’s a problem. I got problems. What can you do?” Zip says, “I got the answers for you, I’ll hook you up. My boy, when you go to video shoots or you’re out in Los Angeles and you feel vulnerable, his people can be your first line of defense.” His mindset was, I’m gonna get people around here that understand these dynamics.

  I think it was out of desperation and fear. After Mark Anthony Bell was kidnapped and accosted, [Puffy] told Keefe D, “Man, this is getting serious. Anything you can do to eliminate this problem for me, man, take care of it.” Well, that means a particular thing to a guy like Keefe D. Puffy’s just talking out
of fear—“I need these motherfuckers out of my life.” I don’t think he’s thinking, Okay, listen, I want to have a contractual agreement that I’m going to pay you a certain amount of money, and then I want these guys killed. Do you understand? It’s something much more nuanced.

  CATHY SCOTT I think because of the way the police department acted, they didn’t bring out all the facts for the media and we all had to chase it down and figure it all out on our own—except for Compton PD, they were straightforward. I think that [the Las Vegas police] are partly responsible for all the conspiracy theories surrounding the case, because they didn’t just come straight out and say what happened. It was as if they didn’t care enough to solve it. If it had been a white rapper, if it had been Eminem, or if it had been a white singer who did a different genre of music, they would have solved the crime. They just looked at him as a thug.

  Say there’s a shoot-out on the west side—or in any other city. There’s a shoot-out and two Black guys shoot each other. Cops call those a twofer. They don’t solve those unless you’ve got some really good gang cops. They should have put the gang cops in Vegas on it, and they could have worked with the PD in Compton and brought charges against Orlando Anderson.

  GREG KADING We became aware of the white Cadillac and Terrence BrownVIII, whose mother-in-law rented the Cadillac. So there’s a connection, because we knew T. Brown and Keefe D and Orlando and all that were very close. We had good reason to believe that T. Brown had been in Las Vegas, and we had good information that the other guy in the car, DeAndre Smith, was in Las Vegas. Both were doing the same thing as Orlando, which was running around telling people in their crew that they had done the murder. It’s information from the streets. It’s of value in the sense that it’s corroborating your suspicions. But it’s not prosecution evidence.