For almost three decades, police said they couldn’t solve the killing of rap icon Tupac Shakur.
Then a former gang leader, Duane “Keffe D” Davis, started talking — recounting the drive-by shooting in interviews and a memoir.
Now Davis will stand trial in a high-profile case that has captivated the public. Jury selection is set to begin Monday in Las Vegas, not far from the intersection where Shakur was shot on Sept. 7, 1996. The trial is expected to take several weeks.
Davis has pleaded not guilty to one count of murder and said he was in the car when a back-seat passenger opened fire on Shakur. His attorney, through a representative, declined to discuss the case. Authorities accuse him of orchestrating the killing, without alleging that he was the gunman. They say the trial might never have happened if not for Davis’s own public comments.
Shakur was at the height of his fame when he died at 25, mourned as one of the most influential artists of the era. He had hit the top of the charts that year with songs like “California Love.”
Speaking at Shakur’s posthumous induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, rapper Snoop Dogg — a friend and collaborator of Shakur’s — said that “while many remember him now as some kind of thugged-out superhero, Tupac knew he was only human and he represented through his music like no one before.”
Here’s what to know about the case and decades-old mystery.
Shakur’s death was part of a gang feud
Officials say the shooting arose from a rivalry between two Los Angeles-area gangs: Mob Piru and South Side Compton Crips. Shakur’s record label, Death Row Records, was affiliated with Mob Piru, police have said, while Davis was “the leader and shot caller” of the Crips.
Members of both groups were in Las Vegas the day of the shooting to watch boxer Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. After the event, police say, the Death Row Records entourage beat up Davis’s nephew.
In his 2019 memoir, Davis recounts that “fateful night in Las Vegas, Nevada when Tupac and the crew he chose to run with crossed the line and put their hands and feet on my nephew Baby Lane.”
“We couldn’t let no record company studio gangsters do us like that,” Davis wrote.
Davis wrote that he set out to confront the Death Row Records group, adding that his entourage was prepared “[in] case the diplomatic approach didn’t work.”
“My crew was Do or Die,” he wrote. “All my young homeys had already been shot at least once, so that turned them into some stone-cold killers — they had the mentality of, ‘It’s either them or me, and it ain’t gonna be me.’”
Police accuse Davis of orchestrating the attack
Davis was riding in a white Cadillac with three other men, authorities say, when they found Shakur. Davis had earlier tossed a gun into the car’s back seat, according to his book.
Shakur was in a black BMW driven by Marion “Suge” Knight, a co-founder of Death Row Records. In Davis’s telling, Shakur “made an erratic move” and “pulled out a strap” — slang for drawing a gun.
“[That’s] when the fireworks started,” Davis wrote. “One of my guys from the back seat grabbed the Glock and started bustin’ back.”
Asked decades later in a documentary interview who shot Shakur, Davis declined to give a name while citing “the code of the streets.”
Prosecutors will argue at trial that Davis was the ringleader in Shakur’s killing. At a news conference announcing charges against Davis in 2023, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said that “if you help somebody commit a crime, you can be equally as guilty.”
He gave an example: If two people agree to rob a bank and one drives the getaway car, they are both guilty.
Police say Davis’s comments revived the case
When law enforcement announced Davis’s arrest, they said detectives learned many of the details of what happened on Sept. 7. 1996, within months of the killing. But they never had enough evidence to bring a case, officials said.
Then, in 2018, Davis was featured in a BET documentary series, “Death Row Chronicles,” recounting the events leading up to Shakur’s death.
The three other people allegedly in the Cadillac with Davis — Deandrae “Freaky” Smith, Davis’s nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson and driver Terry “Bubble Up” Brown — have all died.
In 2019, Davis published his memoir, “Compton Street Legend.”
“We knew at this time that this was likely our last time to take a run at this case,” Lt. Jason Johansson of the Las Vegas police said at the news conference announcing charges against Davis.
Davis’s defense has tried to block prosecutors from using some of his comments in court — including from the book, which defense attorney Michael Sanft noted was written with a co-author and argued was fictionalized “to sell a product.” But Judge Carli Kierny of the Eighth Judicial District Court rejected that argument, noting that Davis has described the book as the truth.
Potential witnesses include Shakur’s family and ‘Suge’ Knight
In court documents, prosecutors have listed more than 200 potential witnesses, with people as varied as investigators and the former head of security for Death Row Records. They said they could also call members of Shakur’s family, such as his sister Sekyiwa Shakur and stepbrother Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur, a former member of the hip-hop group Thug Life.
A long list of potential law enforcement witnesses includes a “Lombardo, J.”; Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) previously served with the Las Vegas police department. The governor’s office did not respond to questions about whether he will be called. The list also includes Knight, the Death Row Records executive who was in the car with Shakur at the time of the shooting. He is now in prison for killing a man with his car.
Prosecutors declined to comment on their witness plans.
The defense has notified the court that they might call an expert on false confessions and “coercive interrogation techniques,” among many others. Davis’s attorney tried to block prosecutors from drawing on an interview police recorded with Davis in 2008, saying it was “involuntary.”
“I sang because they promised I would not be prosecuted,” Davis wrote in his memoir.
But the judge sided with prosecutors and allowed use of the interview at trial.
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