So Knight was behind the wheel of his BMW, with Shakur in the passenger seat. Alexander followed behind, and he wouldn’t even stop for gas when the warning light went on, so concentrated was he on his charge.
The group spent about 30 minutes at Knight’s house before the caravan took off for 662. Knight and Shakur were blasting music. Stopped in traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard, aka the Vegas Strip, a bicycle cop approached Knight’s car. Alexander observed Knight getting out of the car and opening the trunk for the cop, who sent them on their way.
At the next intersection, shortly after 11 p.m., a white Cadillac pulled up next to Knight’s car. A gun-wielding hand poked out and fired 14 shots at the BMW. (The black 1996 BMW has been fully restored and it’s available to buy from Celebrity Cars in Las Vegas for $1.75 million.) Alexander jumped out of his car but Knight, whose skull had been pierced by a bullet fragment, hooked a U-turn and sped off with several other cars in hot pursuit. Slowed by a blown-out tire, he was finally forced to stop. Alexander caught up, as did police and paramedics.
“As soon as everybody came to a stop, bam, the doors all opened up, pretty much everybody got out, and I thought for sure it was going to be a shooting,” retired Las Vegas Metropolitan Police sergeant Chris Carroll, who was on bicycle patrol at the time and was the first officer on the scene that night, recalled to E! News in 2018.
“At the time we have no other information than that there’s been a shooting and that these cars are running from the police. I figured one of [the people in] the cars was the shooter, at least. We don’t know who’s chasing who, or why. So when they got there I pulled out my gun and I was trying to tell everybody, yelling at ’em, to get down on the ground. Some of them did and some of them didn’t. It was kind of a passive resistance. Some of them kind of looked at each other, like, ‘do we listen to him? What are we going to do here?’ They kind of unwillingly complied.”
