Duane “Keffe D” Davis is scheduled to go to trial Monday in Las Vegas over the killing of Tupac Shakur. Prosecutors say he orchestrated the 1996 shooting; Davis has pleaded not guilty and has been jailed since late 2023.
The case reaches a courtroom almost 30 years after Tupac was shot multiple times on Sept. 7, 1996, and died six days later. The trial is expected to last about a month, a rare bid to test a long-cold homicide case in open court rather than leave it to memoirs and interviews.
Maurice Shakur on trial strain
Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur said the process has already taken a toll on Tupac Shakur’s family. He described himself as “cautiously optimistic” and said, “I hope that the trial is fair, and we find out the truth.” He also said sitting through the trial will be retraumatizing.
That reaction fits the scale of what is being tested here: whether years of public statements, plus a 2019 tell-all memoir, can support a murder case that prosecutors say was revived by Davis’s own words. Davis had been making public statements about his involvement as a leader of the South Side Compton Crips, and investigators used those statements to reopen the file.
Grand jury feud theory
Hundreds of pages of grand jury transcripts portray Tupac Shakur’s shooting as the culmination of a longstanding feud between Death Row Records and Bad Boy Records and between Mob Piru and South Side Compton Crips. Witnesses tied Bad Boy Records to Sean “Diddy” Combs and said it included The Notorious B.I.G., or Christopher Wallace, while they linked Death Row Records to Tupac, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre.
Prosecutors say Davis orchestrated the killing to get revenge after Tupac and his entourage beat up his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, at the MGM Grand hours before the shooting. They say the gunfire erupted near the Las Vegas Strip while Tupac was in the passenger seat of a black BMW driven by Marion “Suge” Knight, who survived with minor injuries.
Defense versus prosecutors
The defense says there is no evidence that Davis directed the shooting and argues the state is relying on witnesses who were not there. It also says Davis left the narcotics trade in 2009, worked a steady job before illness forced him to retire in 2014, and should not be tied to the killing on the basis of old claims and later recollections.
Marion “Suge” Knight is serving a 28-year prison sentence for a fatal hit-and-run, leaving Davis as the single defendant now facing a murder charge with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang in Tupac Shakur’s death. The next test is narrow and blunt: whether prosecutors can turn the memoir, the interviews and the feud narrative into proof that he was the shot caller and provided the weapon.
