Billy Garland Shut Out of Tupac's Estate

Original: “Tupac’s Deadbeat Dad Shut Out Of Estate” · MTV News · no byline · December 10, 1997

What it’s about

This short MTV item reports a ruling from Los Angeles: Tupac’s biological father, William Garland, a New Jersey truck driver, would get nothing from his son’s estate, let alone the half he had asked for. Judge Arnold Gold called Garland’s contribution to the boy’s care and support “minuscule.”

Afeni Shakur had fought the claim hard, and the three-day trial heard mostly her testimony. What could be documented came to roughly $820, a bag of peanuts and a movie ticket for Rollerball. Garland, the court heard, had not seen his son for 15 of his 25 years. MTV ends by noting that the estate was tied up in many lawsuits and could be worth millions.

Context

The details match the Los Angeles Times report from the same day, which adds that a DNA test had confirmed Garland’s paternity with 99.97 percent certainty. What decided the case was California inheritance law: a father who was never married to the mother can only inherit if he had a real relationship with the child and helped support it. The “deadbeat dad” headline echoed estate lawyer Richard Fischbein, who called the ruling “a big defeat for deadbeat dads.” Garland’s lawyer said at the time that an appeal had a good chance.

That wasn’t quite the end of it. In October 1998 MTV reported an out-of-court settlement: Garland dropped his claims and, according to that report, received $540,000 plus just over $350,000 in legal fees.

Garland’s story is more than the absent-father role. Like Afeni, he was active in the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, in his case in Jersey City. By his own account, he lost touch in the mid-1970s and resurfaced only once Tupac was famous. Tupac himself told MTV in 1995 that after he was shot in New York in 1994, a man who looked like him suddenly stood at his hospital bed and said he was his father. How close the two became after that is told differently by Garland and by Afeni’s side, what holds up best is what was established in court.

Read more

• Afeni Shakur
• A Year Without Tupac (Part 2): the estate battles