IN THE STREETS & ON THE WEB

Thug Life! Tupac's Last Words Was "F**k You" To The Cops!

The identity of Tupac Shakur’s killer may have died with the legendary rapper.
“F--- you” were the last words the 25-year-old ever uttered as a cop repeatedly asked the fatally wounded Shakur who had shot him, the officer has now revealed nearly 18 years after the recording artist’s death.

“He looked at me and he took a breath to get the words out, and he opened his mouth, and I thought I was actually going to get some cooperation. And then the words came out: ‘F--- you,’” former Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Officer Chris Carroll told Vegas Seven, a weekly newspaper in Sin City. “After that, he started gurgling and slipping out of consciousness. At that point, an ambulance showed up, and he went into unconsciousness.”

Shakur died on Sept. 13, 1996, six days after being shot four times. He reportedly never gained conscious after blurting out his profane final words to Carroll, who was on the city’s bike patrol squad and was the first officer on the scene of the drive-by shooting along the Strip.

Carroll gave his first public account of the mayhem surrounding the September 7, still-unsolved shooting, which happened hours after Mike Tyson knocked out Bruce Seldon in a heavyweight championship bout at the MGM Grand.

Shakur was riding shotgun in Death Row Records founder Suge Knight’s BMW when several men rolled up in a white Cadillac and one opened fire at the intersection of Flamingo and Koval.

Many believe Shakur’s killer was Orlando Anderson, a man who was beaten by the rapper’s entourage in the MGM’s casino shortly after the boxing match but Anderson was shot dead in an unrelated shooting in Compton, Calif. in May 1998.

Shakur had several other enemies, and frequently threatened rivals, the police and even prosecutors in some of his profane gangsta rap songs. His ongoing feud with members of the New York City-based Bad Boy Records, including the Notorious B.I.G. and Puff Daddy, also sparked speculation about who had killed him.

Others believe the rapper is still alive, living out his life in anonymity somewhere.

Despite the feuds, Shakur used his dying breaths to maintain the code of the streets: don’t snitch.

Carroll says he kept quiet about the outspoken rapper’s last words because the homicide case remains open - and because the story only adds to the live-fast, die-young rapper’s legend.

“... I didn’t want Tupac to be a martyr or hero because he told the cops ‘F--- you.’ I didn’t want to give him that," Carroll told the publication. "I didn’t want people to say, ‘Even when the chips were down, his life on the line, he still said ‘F--- you,’ he still wouldn’t talk to the police.’ I didn’t want him to be a hero for that. And now enough time has passed, well, he’s a martyr anyway; he’s viewed as a hero anyway. My story, at this point, isn’t going to change any of that.”