Tupac should have been feeling good.
The high school he had dropped out of had just won the city's basketball championship. He was leaving the game behind the wheel of his Lexus GS300, with a fat roll of cash - $1,650 - in his pocket.
And for protection, he had his stolen SigSauer handgun. Expensive, just like his car.
But Tupac was wary, watchful.
``It's them,'' he warned the friend next to him in the car.
Those were very likely his last words.
On this first Sunday in March, a running feud reached its bloody climax outside the Palestra on 33d Street in West Philadelphia. A gunman and some companions knew Tupac was at the game, knew his dark-green Lexus - and were out to settle a score.
Tupac bolted from his car, firing one shot from his SigSauer. Someone was shooting back. Cartridges clattered onto asphalt. Fans streaming from the Palestra raced for cover.
The big .40-caliber bullets struck Tupac as he ran up a loading ramp. He tumbled onto a Nissan Maxima parked below, rolled off and collapsed.
Jeffrey Noble, 19, next to Tupac in the Lexus, was shot twice in the back as he bolted from the car.
One bullet ripped into the elbow of Latisha Feribee, 20, a bystander slow to duck. Another penetrated the wood walls of a workshop on the University of Pennsylvania campus, injuring grad student John La Bombard, 22, who was building a model of the huts of Romulus, founder of Rome.
Those three survived. Tupac - Anthony Jamal Davis - did not. His tumultuous 22 years were over.
The brazen public killing near an Ivy League campus riveted the city for an instant, shining a light on the devastation wrought by guns in Philadelphia and on an inner-city subculture marked by isolation, the lure of easy money and the ever-present risk of sudden death.
A vivid color photograph on the front page of The Inquirer - showing Davis splayed and bloody on the street, a police officer feeling for a pulse - brought a wide audience face-to-face with a world far removed from the mainstream, a world dimmed by fear and denial, obsessed with respect and revenge, and steeped in guns.
Until bullets brought him down, Davis had burned though his short life unchecked by a criminal-justice system that never seemed to take him seriously enough. A high-school dropout who read at a third-grade level, he seemed to have plenty of money. Adults frown about him, but his funeral drew hundreds of young men and women.
