William Bigger
English 1103
Professor Presnell
11 November 2013
Tupac: Dead or Alive
Tupac Shakur was and still is considered by many to be one of the greatest
rappers to ever live. Unfortunately he was shot and put into the hospital in 1996. He then
passed away after a day of being in urgent care. Or did he?
Tupac was born on June 16, 1971 in New York, New York. He was the son of
Black Panther activists so he didn’t have the best childhood. His mother Afeni Shakur
was actually in jail on bombing charges while pregnant with Tupac. He had no contact
with his biological father until later when he was an adult. When Tupac was a teenager,
he attended the Baltimore School for the Arts where he took dance, acting, and ballet
class. He soon discovered rap, which changed his life. He started performing as MC New
York. In the 1980’s, Tupac and his family moved to the West Coast where he joined a
hip-hop group called “Digital Underground”. He then started using the name 2Pac and his
music started taking off. Tupac became very famous for the music he produced.
One thing about him was that he was a violent man, and you could tell this by
even the lyrics in his songs. He spent multiple years in prison for multiple charges such
as sexual assault and violent offenses. During his career a feud was developed between
East and West Coast rappers, and Tupac was not afraid to call them out in his songs. On
the night of September 7, 1996, Tupac spotted a member of the Southside Crips and
attacked him. He then headed to a nightclub with his crew and that’s when he got shot.
He died six days later in the hospital on September 13th.
After researching the theory that Tupac is still alive, I found some strange
evidence that led me to believe he could still be around. Tupac always wore a bulletproof
vest everywhere he went. Yet the night he was shot he was not wearing the vest. Could
this be to make it seem possible for him to die? Another strange thing is that Tupac’s
body was cremated the day after he died. This seems a little unusual; I feel like people
generally wait more than one day to get a body cremated. Following this, there was never
a funeral for Tupac. There was originally one scheduled, but it was cancelled and never
rescheduled.
Personally, I looked up Tupac’s Coroner’s Report and found it on the Internet. I
found that some of the information seemed to be incorrect. His hair was black as opposed
to what it says on the report being brown. Also, there is no way he weighed 215 lbs.
which is what it said on the report. Furthermore, I physically typed in the Social Security
Number on the report into a website where you can find people by using this number and
found that it is an active number of someone living in Florida. This made me very
skeptical about his death.
This controversy has really intrigued me, even to the point where I wanted to
know what others thought about the topic. I asked a total of 40 people to fill out my
survey during meals I was eating in the dining hall. The survey question was: Do you
think Tupac is still alive? The answer choices were: yes, no, and I don’t know who that is.
I found that 29 think he is still alive, 13 think he’s not, and one person didn’t know who
he was. This reassured me that I wasn’t the only one who thought his death was
somewhat sketchy.
There is technically proof of his death so from an evidence standpoint, I would
have to say that Tupac is dead and gone. I have found some more very interesting
information but unfortunately the sources are not credible enough to use. I think it is very
possible that Tupac is still alive, but I don’t think it is physically capable of being proven.
But who knows, I could run across him walking down the street tomorrow and that would
change a few things.