A former gang leader goes on trial Monday in Las Vegas over the decades-old murder of rapper Tupac Shakur, one of America’s most high-profile unresolved killings.
The proceedings, expected to last about a month, will likely not make clear who fired the shots that killed the hip-hop legend on September 7, 1996. Instead, prosecutors aim to show that the defendant, Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips, ordered the killing and provided the gun used in the drive-by shooting.
Davis faces one charge of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang in Shakur’s death. He faces life in prison without parole if convicted, has been jailed since September 2023, and pleaded not guilty.
The case went cold for years until Davis began making public statements about his involvement as a leader of the South Side Compton Crips. In 2019, he published a tell-all memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” which revived the police investigation. In the book, Davis recounted being in the front passenger seat of the Cadillac and said he handed a pistol to those in the back, but he did not say who opened fire.
Shakur, who also went by the stage names 2Pac and Makaveli, was in Las Vegas to attend a Mike Tyson boxing match at the MGM Grand. After the fight, Shakur and Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight were involved in an altercation with Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, Davis’s nephew and a member of the South Side Compton Crips. Prosecutors say the confrontation was retaliation over an alleged earlier assault on a Death Row employee.
Later that night, a white Cadillac carrying Davis, Anderson and others pulled up beside Shakur’s car. Shots were fired, and Shakur was fatally wounded. Shakur died in hospital six days later. Everyone else believed to have been in the Cadillac that night has since died.
Davis has since backtracked from his public accounts and said they were false and just an attempt to sell books. This creates an unusual legal dynamic: prosecutors will argue the accused murderer is credible and trustworthy, while defense attorneys will deride their client as a liar and fraud.
“I’m innocent. I ain’t killed nobody. Never did ever kill nobody,” Davis said in a March 2025 interview from prison with ABC News. Davis now says he was in Los Angeles the night of the killing and that he has never even read his own memoirs. He asserted they were inflated by his co-author to generate book sales.
The trial will revisit the battle between Death Row Records, founded by Knight, and Bad Boy Records, the East Coast label created by Sean “Diddy” Combs and starring Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, who was murdered in March 1997. Prosecutors say Death Row Records was protected by Mob Piru, a Los Angeles gang that was part of the wider Bloods alliance, while Bad Boy Records had hired the rival South Side Compton Crips, led by Davis, as bodyguards.
The prosecution’s witness list includes former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and members of Shakur’s family. Suge Knight, the only surviving witness to the shooting other than Davis, is also expected to testify.
Jury selection is expected to take about a week. Whatever the eventual verdict, Shakur’s family has indicated that questions surrounding his death remain. In May, the rapper’s stepbrother, Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in civil court.
