On Monday, Las Vegas Police carried out a search warrant in connection with the long-unsolved killing of Tupac Shakur.
Shakur is among the best-selling music artists, having sold more than 75 million records worldwide. Much of Shakur’s music has been noted for addressing contemporary social issues that plagued inner cities, and he is considered a symbol of activism against inequality.
In addition to his music career, Shakur also found considerable success as an actor, with his starring roles in Juice (1992), Poetic Justice (1993), Above the Rim (1994), Bullet (1996), Gridlock’d (1997), and Gang Related (1997).
Interest in the case, in which no arrests have been made, has endured since the rap luminary was shot four times by an unidentified assailant in a drive-by shooting on Sept. 7, 1996, while Shakur was sitting in a BMW near the Las Vegas Strip.
He died six days later at the age of 25.
Shakur was previously shot five times in the lobby of a New York recording studio and experienced legal troubles, including incarceration. In 1995, Shakur served eight months in prison on sexual abuse charges but he was released pending an appeal of his conviction.
Following his murder, Shakur’s friend-turned-rival, Christopher ‘Notorious B.I.G.’ Wallace—who was initially considered a suspect due to their public feud—was also murdered while visiting Los Angeles in another drive-by shooting six months later in March 1997.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said it carried out the search in the nearby city of Henderson, but authorities did not disclose the address, for what they were searching, or even if a suspect had been identified.
Davis has claimed to be one of two eyewitnesses to the drive-by shooting and , According to public records, the house which was raided belonged to the wife of Duane Keith Davis — aka Keffe D —author of the book “Compton Street Legend” and one of two eyewitnesses to the drive-by shooting.
While Assata Shakur is not a blood relative of the musician and actor, she is commonly known as Tupac Shakur’s godmother. Assata, also known as Joanne Chesimard, escaped in 1979, after being convicted of the first-degree murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during a New Jersey Turnpike shootout in 1973.
The Black Liberation Army member was the first woman to be added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Most Wanted Terrorists List
That Shakur’s high-profile killing has gone unsolved is no exception when it comes to gun homicides in major U.S. cities.
A 2019 investigation by The Trace and BuzzFeed News found that when a Black or Hispanic person is fatally shot, the likelihood that a culprit will be caught is 35 percent — 18 percentage points fewer than when the victim is white.
The odds are even lower for nonfatal shootings: 21 percent versus 37 percent.
This recent movement on the Shakur case nearly three decades later is a testament to his stardom: That journalistic investigation found that in some police departments, hundreds of cases never get looked into at all.
The death of Shakur and scores of other rap artists are emblematic of U.S. gun violence.
In 2020, Black men between the ages of 15 to 34 — two percent of the U.S. population — accounted for 38 percent of all gun deaths.
As hip-hop approaches its 50th birthday next month, the toll that firearm homicides have taken on the genre is getting a fresh look, along with other issues that have caused harm, like healthcare disparities and mental health issues.
As A.D. Carson, associate professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia, writes, rap’s golden anniversary is “an opportunity to consider some of the outcomes of systemic barriers to health and wellness, such as access to affordable health care, varied dietary options, and mental wellness resources.”