An arrest has been made in the 1996 shooting death of Tupac Shakur.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis was taken into custody by Las Vegas police early Friday — 27 years after the crime was committed — and charged with murder with use of a deadly weapon with a gang enhancement.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo said a grand jury had been seated in the case for “several months, and described Davis, 60, as the “on-ground, on-site commander” who “ordered the death” of Shakur. Davis was denied bail by Clark County, Nev., District Judge Jerry Wiese. It’s unclear whether Davis, who was arrested while walking near his home in the nearby city of Henderson, has an attorney.
Davis — the uncle of an early suspect in Shakur’s death, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson — has said in past interviews — as well as his 2019 tell-all memoir, Compton Street Legend, that he was in the Cadillac that pulled up alongside the BMW the iconic rap star was in when the gunfire began in September 1996.
Shakur, who was 25, was hit with four rounds and died.
Watch: Davis discusses his role in the Shakur murder with host DJ Vlad, who has said he was contacted by investigators for information on the case:
In a 2018 BET interview, Davis implicated his nephew, who had been in an earlier confrontation with the rapper at a casino, saying Anderson was one of two people in the back seat where the shots were fired. Ultimately, however, it is Davis being held accountable.
“For 27 years the family of Tupac Shakur has been waiting for justice,” Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill said at a Friday news conference. “While I know there’s been many people who did not believe that the murder of Tupac Shakur was important to this police department, I’m here to tell you that is simply not the case.”
Lt. Jason Johansson, a homicide officer with the Las Vegas police, characterized Davis, one of the last surviving witnesses to the shooting, as the “leader and shot caller.” Johansson said that following Davis’s 2018 interview, investigators “knew this was likely our last time to take a run at this case to successfully solve this case and bring forth a criminal charge.”
How we got here
On July 17, there was a stunning development in the long-dormant case when police raided the home of Davis’s wife.
“LVMPD can confirm a search warrant was served in Henderson, Nevada, on July 17, 2023 as part of the ongoing Tupac Shakur homicide investigation,” the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement obtained by Yahoo Entertainment. “We have no further comment at this time.”
A warrant obtained by the Associated Press revealed that the home that was searched was connected to Davis, the uncle of early suspect Anderson. Anderson, one of Shakur’s rivals, himself denied playing a role in the rap legend’s murder after it happened. He died two years later in “an unrelated gang shooting in Compton, Calif.”
According to the warrant, detectives searched for items “concerning the murder of Tupac Shakur,” and they ended up seizing “multiple computers, a cellphone and hard drive, ‘documentary documents,’ a Vibe magazine that featured Shakur, ‘purported marijuana,’ several .40-caliber bullets, two ‘tubs containing photographs’ and a copy of Davis’ 2019 tell-all memoir, Compton Street Legend.”
Where the case stands
In July, the department’s Lt. Jason Johansson told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “It has been a while [since Shakur’s 1996 murder]. It’s a case that’s gone unsolved and hopefully one day we can change that.”
Indeed, no arrests were ever made previously and publicly revealed updates in the case have been next to zilch in recent years.
There were few promising signs from the get-go. Just one year after the shooting, LVMPD Sgt. Kevin Manning, who headed the investigation, told the Las Vegas Sun there was so little evidence and so few witnesses willing to speak that the case “may never be solved.” Various conspiracy theories have been spun over the years related to the rap icon’s death.
A shooting that rocked the rap world
Shakur was shot on Sept. 7, 1996 while in Las Vegas where he attended a Mike Tyson boxing fight at the MGM Grand with Death Row Records founder Suge Knight. After being involved in a scuffle in the hotel casino’s lobby, Shakur was just blocks off the Las Vegas Strip in a convoy en route to Knight’s Death Row nightclub when the black BMW Knight was driving was fired on by someone in a white Cadillac. Shakur was struck four times, including twice in the chest. He died six days later on Sept. 13, 1996 at the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, after his mother, Afeni Shakur, consented to have him taken off of life support.
The investigation
In 2002, a two-part investigative report from the Los Angeles Times’s Chuck Philips alleged the killer was Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, a Compton Southside Crip gang member who had been attacked by Shakur a few hours earlier.
“When he ran across the lobby of that casino and slugged another gang member, he signed his own death warrant,” said former Los Angeles Police Det. Greg Kading, who led a task force to investigate the murder of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. (aka Biggie, born Christopher Wallace). Las Vegas police, however, only interviewed Anderson once, and he was killed in an unrelated gang shooting two years later.
Biggie and Tupac were involved in an ugly public feud known as Hip Hop’s “East Coast-West Coast beef” at the time, and Wallace was gunned down in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997 in a killing that has long been linked to Shakur’s death. Philips’s year-long investigation also incriminated Biggie, alleging that Wallace promised the Southside Crips $1 million to murder Shakur and even supplied the gun used in the killing.
Shakur was 25. Wallace was 24.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published July 18, 2023 and has been updated with new information.
