Tupac's Last Words: What Is Documented

After the shots at the intersection of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, police stopped the BMW with its shot-out tires on Las Vegas Boulevard. In the passenger seat sat Tupac, badly wounded. It was there at the roadside, and shortly afterwards in the ambulance, that the sentences now remembered as his last words were spoken.

“What were Tupac’s last words?” is one of the most searched questions about his death. The internet offers dozens of answers, many of them without any source. Only a few sentences are documented, and none of them come from the hospital: two answers to police officers who asked him who had shot him, and a shout to a friend who was driving behind him in the convoy. This page puts them in context and separates them from legend.

The night itself is described on The 1996 Las Vegas shooting, the days that followed on The last week.

A stop at gunpoint

After the attack at about 11:15 p.m., Suge Knight swung the BMW around on shot-out tires and headed back toward the Strip. About a mile away, at Las Vegas Boulevard and Harmon Avenue, bicycle officers stopped him. Not knowing at first what had happened, they ordered the men from the BMW and the cars behind it onto the ground at gunpoint. Tupac sat badly wounded in the passenger seat.

There at the roadside, and a little later on the ride to University Medical Center (UMC), he spoke for the last documented time. At the hospital he went into surgery that same night. Spokesman Dale Pugh said over the following days that Tupac had been conscious at times but was heavily sedated. He was put on a ventilator and later into a medically induced coma. No documented sentences survive from his six days at UMC.

Chris Carroll: “Fuck you”

In May 2014, retired sergeant Chris Carroll of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (Metro) spoke publicly about that night for the first time, in the city magazine Vegas Seven. Rolling Stone, CNN and many others picked up the story. Carroll was among the first officers at the BMW. He said he found Tupac in the passenger seat, shot but conscious, trying to shout something to Suge Knight.

Carroll asked again and again who had fired. The reason: a dying person’s statement about an attacker can be admitted as evidence in court. Tupac, he said, looked at him, took a breath and said:

“Fuck you.” according to Chris Carroll, Vegas Seven, May 2014

Carroll took it as a refusal to talk to police. His account is the recollection of a single officer, 18 years after the shooting. No record of these words from that night has been made public. But the attitude fits what police and witnesses said about the mood that evening: nobody around Death Row wanted to talk to investigators.

Garry Dale: “We’ll take care of it”

Twelve years later, on August 17, 2026, a second officer was questioned about it under oath. Garry Dale, also on bicycle patrol that night, was the first witness at the trial of Duane “Keffe D” Davis. He had stopped the BMW earlier that evening over missing license plates, and he rode with Tupac in the ambulance after the shooting.

Dale, too, tried to get Tupac to name his attackers. Tupac was still talking, he said, but answered with words to the effect of “No, we’ll take care of it.” He said it at least twice, and Dale got no further.

The two accounts do not necessarily contradict each other. Carroll describes the scene at the car, Dale the ride to the hospital. Both show the same thing: Tupac refused to give police a name. Whether he had even recognized the shooters is unknown. The English-language Wikipedia states that Dale also confirmed Carroll’s version at trial; the reports of his testimony reviewed for this page do not mention that.

E.D.I. Mean: a warning to a friend

Not all the documented words of that night were meant for police. On August 25, 2026, Malcolm Greenidge testified, known as the rapper E.D.I. Mean of the Outlawz. That night he was in the car directly behind the BMW. He told the court how, after the stop at Harmon Avenue, the badly wounded Tupac shouted to him to get down on the ground before officers aimed a shotgun at the group. Greenidge saw it as a warning that may have kept things from getting worse.

These are the only documented words Tupac spoke after the shooting that were not addressed to police. They come from sworn testimony given 30 years after the event. As with any memory that old, details may have shifted.

Frank Alexander and Kidada Jones

Tupac’s bodyguard Frank Alexander was also in the car behind the BMW and later described the night in his book Got Your Back. Online summaries sometimes attribute to him the same sentence Garry Dale reported. No reliable source for that wording from Alexander was available for this page. Alexander died in 2013.

Tupac’s girlfriend Kidada Jones was at the hospital in the days that followed. An often-repeated story says she played him Don McLean’s Vincent, that he reacted, and that she told him she loved him. Wikipedia cites an MTV report from September 1996. The archived version of that report available to us does not contain it. The scene is therefore marked here as unconfirmed. In any case, it contains no words from Tupac.

Quotes without a source

Many more “last words” circulate on quote sites and social media: lines to his mother, to Suge Knight, to doctors or nurses, sometimes song lyrics put in his mouth after the fact. None of them has a traceable source. Neither UMC nor the family has ever released anything Tupac said in his hospital room. Afeni Shakur, who stayed at his bedside to the end, never made any such statement.

Suge Knight, too, talked about that night again and again over the decades, in shifting versions. His accounts have not been independently confirmed and are not presented here as Tupac’s words.

A silence with consequences

Tupac’s answers had consequences for the investigation. Had he named someone, it would have been powerful evidence as a dying declaration. Instead, the case went 27 years without a charge. That the prosecution opened its 2026 case with Garry Dale shows how much that silence shaped everything: in the end the case was solved not by the victim’s words but by those of a defendant who spent years talking about the crime himself. More on The investigation and The Duane Davis trial, 2026.

Tupac died at UMC at 4:03 p.m. on September 13, 1996. What doctors said about his injuries is covered on Injuries, cause of death and autopsy.