Tupac Shakur was sitting in a black BMW on a Las Vegas boulevard when a stranger pulled up beside him at a red light and decided to grab his camera for one final shot.
That moment, captured on film in September 1996, would become the last known photograph of the legendary rapper alive, and nearly three decades later, Leonard Jefferson is telling the courtroom exactly how it all happened during the murder trial of Duane “Keefe D” Davis.
Jefferson traveled to Vegas that weekend for a specific reason.
“I was coming to attend the Mike Tyson group,” he explained from the witness stand on Day 5 of the trial. He’d driven in from Los Angeles with a friend, staying at the Monte Carlo Hotel, and the two had headed to the MGM Grand for the fight.
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But when they got there, the ticket situation changed everything.
“I was just in the lobby, people watching,” Jefferson recalled, describing how he and his companion ended up selling their tickets to some visitors from Detroit who were wearing matching green suits.
“I offered us $2,500 each for our tickets, and we didn’t pass it up,” he said, pocketing the cash instead of watching what turned out to be a quick fight anyway.
After hanging around the arena for a couple hours, Jefferson got hungry and decided to leave. He called California Pizza Kitchen to place an order, then headed to the valet to retrieve his white Suburban.
That’s when everything shifted into motion. Driving down Las Vegas Boulevard toward the restaurant, he noticed something that caught his eye.
“I was stopped at a light, and I a car rolled up, or really the wheels really caught my attention, and I looked up and I saw Tupac and Suge sticking with the car,” Jefferson testified.
He recognized the rapper from previous interactions back in Los Angeles.
“Back in those days, I used to sell cars, and a couple people that worked for Death Row Records sold them a couple of cars, and I delivered them to Can-Am Studios in the Valley,” he explained, describing how he’d met Tupac and Suge Knight before through the car business.
At that red light, Jefferson made a split-second decision to reach out.
“Hey, what up, Pac?” he called out. Tupac responded immediately.
“And then he kind of looked…He said, Oh, what up, man?”
The two exchanged words, and Jefferson asked where they were headed.
“He said, We’re headed to the club. You should follow us,” Tupac told him. That’s when Jefferson had an idea.
“Let me get a picture real quick. And I just, I had my camera in my center console, so I just grabbed, grabbed my camera, and snapped the picture.”
He was carrying a 35 millimeter camera, the kind that required actual film and physical development, not the instant digital capture people know today.
The light turned green, and the BMW pulled ahead with Jefferson following a few cars back. They made their way down the boulevard, and when they reached Flamingo, the BMW made a right turn. Jefferson was on his phone at that moment, handling some business.
“I was calling California Pizza Kitchen to cancel my food order,” he said, because he was heading to the club with Pac, explaining his reasoning. But then everything went wrong.
“I was on the phone with him like 30 seconds or so, and then all of a sudden I just hear pop, pop, pop,” Jefferson testified. He didn’t know where the shots were coming from, he said, ducking down instinctively.
When he looked up, he saw people from the caravan jumping out of their vehicles and running toward the BMW. Then Suge Knight made a sudden move.
“All of a sudden I see the BMW make a big wide U-turn going back towards Las Vegas Boulevard,” Jefferson recalled. The situation spiraled into chaos. Someone even tried to get into Jefferson’s Suburban by mistake.
He made his own U-turn and got caught up in the scramble, following the BMW as it made erratic turns through the streets. Eventually, they ended up on Harmon Avenue, where a bicycle cop appeared and pulled a gun on Jefferson, ordering him out of his vehicle.
The officer threw him to the ground, and Jefferson found himself face-down on the pavement. When he asked what was happening, the cop’s response was direct.
“We have witnesses saying that you were part of their entourage,” the officer told him. Jefferson was detained and questioned, his Suburban searched.
But then something unexpected happened. After he was released and returned to his hotel, a police officer showed up at his door.
“We fucked up. The detectives want you back at the scene, so we need to get you back at the scene,” the officer said, according to Jefferson’s testimony. They needed him to help with the investigation.
Back at the scene, detectives asked Jefferson what he’d witnessed. During the conversation, he mentioned that he’d taken a photograph just minutes before the shooting. The detective’s interest immediately spiked.
Jefferson had the camera with him, and he handed over the film cartridge after rewinding it. A couple of weeks later, police returned the developed film, and that’s when Jefferson saw what he’d captured.
The image showed Tupac in the passenger seat of the BMW, looking directly at the camera, with Suge Knight visible behind the wheel. It was the last photograph of Tupac before his death.
Over the years, that image became one of the most iconic photographs in Hip-Hop history. But with fame came scrutiny and conspiracy theories.
People online began speculating that Jefferson had somehow staged the entire encounter, that the photo was too perfectly timed, too conveniently captured.
When asked directly if he’d orchestrated the scene, his answer was unequivocal. “I did not,” he stated firmly.
Jefferson’s testimony provided the courtroom with a detailed, firsthand account of the moments leading up to Tupac’s murder, and the photograph he took has remained central to how the world remembers the rapper’s final hours.
Keefe D, whose real name is Duane Davis, is on trial for orchestrating Tupac’s 1996 murder in Las Vegas as part of a gang-related revenge plot, and prosecutors allege he gave the gun used in the shooting to his nephew, who fired the fatal shots at the BMW carrying Tupac and Suge Knight.
