Tupac Shakur dies

Why it matters

Tupac Shakur was shot in a drive-by on the Vegas Strip on the night of September 7, 1996, after attending the Mike Tyson vs Bruce Seldon fight at the MGM Grand. He was a passenger in Suge Knight's BMW. The shooter pulled up to a stoplight in a white Cadillac and fired into the passenger window. Tupac was hit four times, twice in the chest. He died at University Medical Center in Las Vegas on September 13, six days later. He was 25. The case went unsolved for twenty-seven years. In 2023 the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police arrested Duane "Keffe D" Davis, a former South Side Compton Crip, for the murder. Davis had publicly named himself as a participant in interviews and a memoir in the years before the arrest. The case is pending trial as of this writing. Tupac's death is one of the most consequential deaths in American popular music in the late 20th century. The catalog he made in his last year (All Eyez on Me, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory) is dominant on the airwaves to this day. He was 25. You can hear how many decades he was going to have, in the records, and you can hear them not happening.