Shakur Attack, 2 Slayings May Be Linked

As mourners for rap star Tupac Shakur made preparations Monday for his memorial service, police probed the possibility that two men who were shot in Compton last week may have been killed as payback for the attack on Shakur.

Giving weight to speculation that has circulated in the music industry since Shakur was gunned down Sept. 7, a police source in Compton said Monday his department is exploring a possible link between the murder of the rapper and the deaths of two 21-year-old men at a Compton apartment complex Friday afternoon.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said police had received “unconfirmed” reports that Shakur had been shot as the result of a Compton gang grudge and that retaliation had begun. The source added: “We’re looking at everything and anything.”

Police provided only sketchy details about the double murder under investigation: On Friday, about three hours before Shakur was pronounced dead, Marcus Duron Childs and Timothy Flanagan were working on a car in the carport of a run-down complex on North Burris Avenue at 12:18 p.m. when a man walked up to them with a handgun and opened fire. A 37-year-old bystander was wounded by a stray bullet, police said.

The timing of the Compton incident ignited a flurry of speculation in Shakur’s circle. Then, in Monday’s editions, Newsweek magazine quoted an unnamed Los Angeles police officer who said the shootings appeared to be payback for Shakur.

The Compton investigation is the latest wrinkle in a high-profile murder that, so far, has been cloaked in conjecture and secrecy. Shakur, who had cultivated a violent mystique in both his lyrics and his life, was shot four times in Las Vegas while riding in a BMW driven by Marion “Suge” Knight, the Compton-born head of the record label for which Shakur recorded.

Las Vegas police say they have received little cooperation from witnesses and have few leads. Shakur died late Friday afternoon in a Las Vegas hospital after spending nearly a week in intensive care. Sources close to his entourage said he was cremated in Las Vegas the following day and that his family held a private funeral.

At the Davis Funeral Home, which was handling the funeral for the family in Las Vegas, a spokesman refused to discuss the arrangements.

“The family has asked that everything remain private,” the spokesman explained.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, a spokesman for Shakur’s label, Death Row Records, released a statement saying a memorial service will be held Thursday at 11:30 a.m. at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on 8th Street at Wilshire Boulevard.

“Suge Knight and the entire Death Row Records family are saddened by the passing of our brother and star rap recording artist Tupac Amaru Shakur,” an earlier Death Row statement said. “A true warrior, Tupac vigorously fought for his life until his heart failed this past Friday afternoon.”

In New York, a spokesman for the Nation of Islam said several rappers and African American celebrities, including director John Singleton and actress Jada Pinkett, had been invited to a “hip-hop day of atonement” on Sunday at Muhammad Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, which was once led by Malcolm X.

The Harlem event is particularly significant because attendees were expected to include rival entertainers who had carried on a public bicoastal feud with Shakur and Death Row. Sean “Puffy” Combs, head of Bad Boy Entertainment in New York, and rapper the Notorious B.I.G. were expected to appear at the service and make their first public statements about Shakur’s murder, said Conrad Muhammad, a New York representative of Louis Farrakhan.

Muhammad said that representatives of Death Row had been invited as well.

“We want to call, once and for all, for an end to the violence and to extract a commitment on the part of the artists to stop this genocidal madness of killing, stop the negative lyrics and go back to the origin of hip-hop,” he said.

“The hip-hop culture started so people could battle on the mike instead of battling in real life.”

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, sources close to Shakur’s entourage said that the charismatic and troubled artist may have been the casualty of a long-simmering gang grudge. The Compton-born Knight has long-standing connections to a Blood set in his old neighborhood, and was driving the car in which Shakur was riding when he was shot.

But Las Vegas authorities said Knight and his entourage became stubbornly closed-mouthed as their probe progressed, offering nothing but the most basic facts of the shooting: that a white Cadillac had pulled up next to Knight’s BMW at a stoplight, and that two African American men inside had stepped into traffic and opened fire.

Knight, a flamboyant, 315-pound former University of Nevada, Las Vegas football star who is said to have had three contracts out on his life, suffered a minor head wound in the incident, but Shakur, in the passenger seat, was shot four times. Surgeons said before his death that Shakur’s torso, on which he had tattooed the words “thug life,” was so ripped apart by bullets that they had to remove a lung.

With no official information on motives for the attack, rumor and speculation ruled.

Music industry sources and acquaintances of Knight focused on three theories: that the shooting stemmed from bad blood between Shakur and a rival rapper, that it was a crime of passion resulting from a bitter argument Shakur had earlier that evening at the Mike Tyson heavyweight fight, and that the shooting was a gang hit by a set of Crips who had been out to hurt Knight and Shakur ever since a party in which a man was stomped to death by a mob of fellow revelers with ties to the Bloods.

That third theory was brought to the fore with Friday’s double homicide in Compton, where Knight was raised and still owns property.

Staff writer Jerry Crowe contributed to this report.