Tupac Shakur Fans Rush to Buy Slain Rapper’s Works

Somber fans of slain rapper Tupac Shakur--and an array of newcomers to his musical chronicles of the hard-edged gang life--cleared store shelves of his works Saturday, a time-honored rite of paying respect to fallen recording icons.

As Las Vegas authorities pressed a frustrating hunt for Shakur’s killer and the coroner released the 25-year-old gangsta rapper’s body to a local funeral home, waves of customers across the Southland snatched up Shakur’s tapes and compact discs.

Shakur died Friday afternoon of gunshot wounds he sustained in a drive-by shooting the previous Saturday night as his entourage headed to a Las Vegas nightclub after the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon boxing match.

By early Saturday, several stores had sold out of Shakur’s recordings, while video stores reported brisk rentals of his music videos and feature films.

A mother and daughter entered the Wherehouse music store in the Baldwin Hills Plaza on Saturday afternoon, quietly inquiring if any of Shakur’s CDs remained. “I just wanted to know, because it’s pretty sad,” 10-year-old Magan Chacon said before leaving empty-handed.

The run on Shakur’s works began late Friday at the West Hollywood Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, where the rapper occasionally purchased jazz albums. “It’s all sorts [and] all sorts of ages. It’s everybody. I think people are curious to see what all the fuss is about,” said sales clerk Rich Brigham. Some making their way to the music shops tried to draw meaning from the artist’s tangled odyssey of wealth, stardom and recurring violence and trouble with the law.

At the Tempo Music and Video shop in the Crenshaw district, Hines Buchanan, a rapper and promoter of hip-hop artists, said: “I think [Shakur] already realized it’s not all about struggling and shooting up and Hennessey’s [cognac]. His death should be a lesson to rappers and people to be real. That it’s not all about being hard.”

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, the Clark County coroner completed an autopsy of Shakur late Friday, officially establishing the cause of death as multiple gunshot wounds. The coroner told reporters Friday that services would be planned in California. But the Las Vegas funeral home handling arrangements declined to provide any details, citing family requests for privacy.

With little useful information from several eyewitnesses to the crime, including Death Row Records executive Marion “Suge” Knight, investigators were hoping to cull new leads from a hotline, said Sgt. Greg McCurdy.