Yafeu Akiyele Fula, known by his stage name Yaki Kadafi, was 19 when he was shot and killed in Orange, New Jersey on November 10, 1996. Police found him about 3:48 a.m. in the third-floor hallway of an apartment building at 325 Mechanic Street; he had sustained a single gunshot wound to the head. He was visiting a friend in the building and was taken to University Hospital in Newark, where he died that afternoon.

Kadafi had been a member of the Outlawz and was in the car behind Tupac Shakur on the night Shakur was killed two months earlier. He had told police he might be able to identify Shakur’s assailant, which prompted early speculation that his death was connected to the Las Vegas murder. Orange police arrested two teenagers within days of Kadafi’s killing, and investigators later identified Roddy Beale as the person who fired the fatal shot. Mutah Napoleon Beale said the shooting was accidental, alleging he and his cousin had been intoxicated and playing with a gun when it discharged.

Was anyone in the building that night ever able to provide more detail about what happened in that hallway?