Tupac Shakur’s killing brought ‘10 days of hell’ to Compton. The bloodshed helped crack the case
LOS ANGELES — Tupac Shakur was killed in Las Vegas, but it was in Compton — home to both the rapper’s allies and his accused killers — where the aftershocks erupted.
They started two days after Shakur was fatally shot the night of Sept. 7, 1996, when someone opened fired from a gray sedan with tinted windows and chrome rims on Alondra Boulevard, hitting a leader of a local Crip gang — as well as a 10-year-old girl.
So began “the 10 days of hell,” said Robert Ladd, a former Compton detective who investigated Shakur’s death and the retaliatory killings that spiraled from it. By its end, three people were dead and 10 were wounded.
Solving Shakur’s killing was not the responsibility of the Compton police, but as they investigated the back-and-forth shootings that stemmed from it in their own city, they quickly pieced together — through informants, field interviews and seizures of firearms and other evidence — a remarkably prescient account of why the rapper was killed and who was behind it.
Compton detectives laid out their findings in an affidavit that authorized them to search 38 homes and apartments in Compton, Long Beach, Lynwood, Downey, Paramount and Lakewood.
The document, written just 18 days after Shakur was shot, proved to be a road map for the Las Vegas investigation, which would drag on for the next 27 years while the rapper’s death became the subject of endless books, documentaries and conspiracy theories.
“We knew things would play out sooner or later. I just didn’t think it would take 26, 27 years,” Ladd said.
The affidavit shows that within five days of Shakur’s shooting, Compton police heard from an
