Biggie and Tupac | 2. Cops on My Tail
Slow Burn
Slate Audio
4.6 • 25.2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1992, Ronald Ray Howard shot and killed Texas state trooper Bill Davidson. His lawyer argued he’d been driven to murder by the music he’d been playing in his car: a dubbed copy of Tupac Shakur’s first album, 2Pacalypse Now.
On the second episode of Slow Burn’s third season: How gangsta rap and law enforcement found themselves at war.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast has language that some people might find offensive. |
| 0:05.4 | Ronald Ray Howard grew up in South Park, a tough neighborhood in Houston. He described it as a war zone. |
| 0:12.1 | Like Tupac Shakur, he moved around a lot as a child. Howard attended nine different elementary schools and was held back three times. When he was 16, he dropped out of high school. |
| 0:24.3 | Howard ended up selling drugs in the town of Port Lavaca, two hours down the Gulf |
| 0:28.7 | coast from Houston. |
| 0:30.5 | That's where he was headed the night of April 11, 1992, when a Texas highway patrolman |
| 0:35.9 | pulled him over. |
| 0:37.9 | Howard wasn't a fan of law enforcement. |
| 0:40.7 | This is Alan Tanner, a criminal defense lawyer. |
| 0:43.6 | You know, here was a young kid from Houston who had had problems with police in his neighborhood |
| 0:48.8 | where a lot of the kids were brought up there to hate cops to begin with. |
| 0:53.7 | Howard had another reason to be wary. |
| 0:56.0 | He was a drug dealer driving a stolen car. |
| 1:00.0 | The patrolman who pulled Howard over was named Bill Davidson. |
| 1:03.0 | He'd been on the force for about 20 years. |
| 1:06.0 | He and his wife Linda had raised two children in the town of Edna, |
| 1:09.0 | population 5500, where he was a city council |
| 1:12.1 | member and the president of the Little League. As Davidson approached Ronald Ray Howard's car, |
| 1:21.6 | Howard shot him in the neck with a 9mm pistol. Davidson died three days later. |
| 1:28.3 | Howard was arrested not long after he fled the scene. |
| 1:33.3 | He confessed to the crime soon after. |
| 1:36.3 | In most cases, the murder of a highway patrolman would have remained a local tragedy. |
... |
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