F***ck You! The Last Words of Tupac Shakur.

One late-summer night in 1996, a rap superstar was gunned down just off the Strip. Since then, his story has become legend. But for the Metro cop who was first on the scene, that night remains unforgettably real. 

The call came in on the radio just after 11:15 p.m.: Shots had been fired near the intersection of Flamingo and Koval, with possible victims. Several vehicles had made a U-turn on Flamingo and headed west. The bicycle officer who made the call from the Maxim hotel began trailing the cars, but was too far behind to catch them. He could, however, see them turn left onto Las Vegas Boulevard.

Chris Carroll was a sergeant on the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s bike patrol unit on the Strip. The 12 officers under his command rode in pairs, but Carroll was riding solo when he got the call that night, September 7, 1996. Traffic on the Strip is always slow-moving on a Saturday evening, but it was especially thick in the aftermath of Mike Tyson’s first-round technical knockout of Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand a few hours earlier. And, now, somewhere in the midst of all those vehicles was a caravan of cars, one of them perhaps carrying the shooter.

“He went from fighting to ‘I can’t do it.’ And when he made that transition, he looked at me, and he’s looking right in my eyes. And that’s when I looked at him and said one more time, ‘Who shot you?’

“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: ‘Fuck you.’

“After that, he started gurgling and slipping out of consciousness. At that point, an ambulance showed up, and he went into unconsciousness.