Nearly three decades after Tupac Shakur was shot on the Las Vegas Strip, a jury has convicted a man of his murder. Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, was found guilty on Monday, August 31 of murder with a deadly weapon for orchestrating the September 1996 shooting that killed the rapper.
The jury of 12, with four alternates, deliberated for less than three hours after nine days of testimony. Davis faces a possible sentence of life in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for October.
The case against Davis
Prosecutors never claimed that Davis pulled the trigger. Instead they argued that he was a gang leader whose orders younger men followed, and that he set the killing in motion to avenge the beating of his nephew earlier that night.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors that Davis “went hunting” for Shakur and the Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight. “Tell him you hear him. Find him guilty,” he said in closing.
Much of the evidence came from Davis himself. Over the years he repeatedly placed himself in the white Cadillac from which the shots were fired, including in his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, and in interviews in which he urged people to buy the book for the “real truth”. In those accounts he said he passed a gun to the back seat but did not say who fired. In rebuttal, prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo pointed to a scrapbook Davis kept: “This guy’s scrapbooking his murder, for God’s sake.”
The defence
Defence attorney Michael Sanft argued there was no physical evidence linking his client to the shooting and dismissed Davis’s book and public statements as “dramatized bravado.”
“They have nothing in this case that says that man was here in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996,” Sanft told the jury.
Prosecutors called 24 witnesses; the defence called three. A gang enhancement charge was dropped during the trial because of witness logistics.
A killing at the height of a rap rivalry
On September 7, 1996, Shakur was stopped at a red light near the Las Vegas Strip when a white Cadillac pulled alongside and shots were fired. He died six days later, aged 25. Knight, who was driving, was wounded but survived. Davis is the only one of the four men prosecutors say were in the car who is still alive.
Witnesses described a rivalry between the Los Angeles gangs Mob Piru and Davis’s Southside Compton Crips, which were linked respectively to Knight’s Death Row Records and Sean “Diddy” Combs’s Bad Boy Records. The 1997 killing of Bad Boy star the Notorious B.I.G. remains unsolved.
Reaction
After the verdict, Shakur’s sister, Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur, wept and embraced the prosecutors. Family members said they would wait until sentencing to comment further. For many fans, the verdict brings a measure of closure to one of the most scrutinised unsolved cases in music history.