Tupac Told Police 'We’ll Take Care Of It' After 1996 Shooting, Officer Says

A refusal to identify his attackers is now part of the evidence jurors are hearing in the murder case tied to Tupac Shakur’s death. Retired Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officer Garry Dale testified that the wounded rapper was still speaking inside the ambulance after the September 1996 shooting and repeatedly resisted his attempts to get a name. According to Dale, Shakur responded with words to the effect of, “No, we’ll take care of it.”

Dale told the court he was trying to gather information about who had opened fire on Shakur and Suge Knight when he pressed the rapper for details. “He was still talking, and I was trying to convince him to tell me the name of whoever his assailants were,” he testified. Dale said Shakur repeated the response a couple of times before the officer realized he was not going to get anything further from him. A transcript of the testimony records Dale saying, “I couldn’t get him to talk to me any further than that.”

The two had crossed paths only minutes earlier under far different circumstances. Dale testified that he and another officer stopped the BMW carrying Shakur and Knight because it lacked a visible license plate. They issued a warning and let the pair continue. Roughly 10 minutes later, Dale responded to the shooting scene and ultimately climbed into the ambulance with Shakur as paramedics rushed him to University Medical Center.

His account also complicates one of the most repeated stories about Shakur’s final conscious moments. Retired Las Vegas officer Chris Carroll said in 2014 that he asked Shakur who shot him while tending to him at the scene and received a profane response before the rapper appeared to lose consciousness. Carroll characterized those as the last words he heard Shakur speak. Dale’s sworn testimony now places Shakur talking again during the ambulance ride, with another refusal to identify whoever was responsible. Carroll’s account, based on his own recollection, was widely reported nearly 18 years after he gave it.

That refusal carries added context inside Duane “Keefe D” Davis’ trial, where prosecutors are reconstructing a case marked from the beginning by witnesses who either could not or would not identify the people involved. Former homicide detective Brent Becker testified that Knight later provided investigators with little useful information and that he believed Knight was lying during his police interview. Other witnesses have described fears of retaliation and reluctance to cooperate with authorities.

Prosecutors accuse Davis of organizing the shooting after Shakur and members of the Death Row entourage attacked Davis’ nephew, Orlando Anderson, inside the MGM Grand following the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon fight. They do not allege Davis pulled the trigger. Instead, the state says he obtained the gun and helped direct the retaliation from the white Cadillac that pulled alongside Shakur and Knight on the Las Vegas Strip. Davis has pleaded not guilty, and his defense maintains that the stories he later told about the killing were exaggerated or fabricated rather than reliable admissions.