Sep 16, 1997417 words · 2 min
Afeni Shakur sues Orlando Anderson
September 1997: Frustrated with Las Vegas police, Afeni Shakur files a wrongful-death suit against Orlando Anderson.
Original: “Tupac’s Mother Blames Anderson For Death In Lawsuit” · MTV News · no byline · September 16, 1997
A week after Orlando Anderson sued Tupac’s estate over the MGM Grand beating, Afeni Shakur hit back. On Friday, September 12, 1997, the day before the first anniversary of Tupac’s death, she filed a wrongful-death suit in Los Angeles. It was aimed at the man Las Vegas police had at one point named as a suspect: Orlando Anderson.
A lawyer takes aim at the police
MTV reported the move on September 16. Her lawyer, Richard Fischbein, supplied the reason right away: Las Vegas police, he said, had “as much interest in solving this crime as the man on the moon.” Nobody could do a worse job than the officers had.
The suit relied on a Compton police affidavit from the fall of 1996, written to obtain search warrants against gang members. It framed the killing as part of the feud between the Southside Crips and the Mob Piru Bloods, a set with ties to people around Death Row. Anderson allegedly fired from a white Cadillac. According to the affidavit, the hotel fight had grown out of a dispute over a stolen gold chain at a mall in Lakewood.
A suspect under oath
Anderson denied everything. A few days later he told the Los Angeles Times that Tupac had been “like a hero” to him. He wanted the real killer caught, he said, so that his name would be cleared. Las Vegas police said there was no direct evidence against him.
The family turned to civil law because it requires a lower standard of proof than a criminal trial. In February 1998, Shakur’s lawyers questioned Anderson under oath for six hours. According to Fischbein, he contradicted statements he had earlier given to police.
Never charged
There was never a verdict. Anderson was killed on May 29, 1998, in an unrelated shooting in Compton. The competing lawsuits were settled in the summer of 2000.
Anderson was never charged with a crime. Only in 2026 did a Las Vegas jury find his uncle, Duane “Keffe D” Davis, guilty of the murder. Davis had said himself in a 2018 TV documentary that Anderson rode with him in the Cadillac, and described his own role in a 2019 memoir; he later called the book fiction. The verdict is not final (as of October 2026).