After uncovered conspiracies, “he-say-she-say” testimonies, and law enforcement’s failure to thoroughly investigate, the answers to Tupac’s cold case murder of 1996 may never see the light of day.

But not all of them and one of the key pieces of evidence has resurfaced with strong potential to identify those responsible for Pac’s untimely death: the handgun that was used to kill him.

According to a police document obtained by producers of A&E’s “Who Killed Tupac?” docu-series, the weapon was found in a backyard in Compton in 1998, two years after the fatality.

The gun is described as a .40 caliber Glock, which was turned over to Compton police after a citizen discovered it in his yard. Reportedly, records from that year show that police filed it as found property in May 1998.

Two years later, the weapon ended up being transferred to the L.A. County Sherriff’s Department with the 3,800 firearms seized by police when the department’s jurisdiction spread to Compton. It all clicked in 2006, however, when Deputy T. Brennan spotted the address where the weapon was originally found as the residence of a well-known Crip member’s girlfriend. At the time, Brennan was working to uncover the death of Pac’s rap nemesis Notorious B.I.G., whose murder was tightly connected to Pac’s amid their vicious rap beef, and had been going through documents from Pac’s case.

Peaking his interest even further, the Crip member in question also happened to be an enemy of the West Coast icon.

Brennan set up ballistic testing for the weapon and results came back positive as a match for the gun behind Pac’s murder. However, a federal prosecutor halted its transfer back to Las Vegas police, who oversaw the case after Pac was killed on Las Vegas grounds, out of fear that the weapon’s discovery might tip off any conspirators involved in his death. TMZ adds that it was also possible that law enforcement feared any gang rivalry flare-ups if news broke that the gun was tied to the Crip member.

Admittedly, this is shocking news to all of us. But nothing like what it was for Mopreme Shakur, Pac’s older step-brother, who met Benjamin Crump, the civil rights attorney who is also producing the A&E docu-series. Crump reveals the confidential document about the weapon’s history to Mopreme, assuring that police intended to keep it concealed even from him. Mopreme said he’d never been informed that the weapon tested positive as the gun that killed his brother, let alone that it had even been found.