Jury selection has begun in Las Vegas for Duane Keith Davis, known as Keffe D, who stands accused of orchestrating the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur, per cnn.com. Davis, 63, was indicted in 2023 on one count of murder with a deadly weapon and has pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors do not allege he fired the fatal shots, but say he directed the killing in retaliation for an assault on his nephew hours earlier.
Shakur was shot four times in a drive-by attack near the Las Vegas Strip on September 7, 1996, hours after watching Mike Tyson’s fight against Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand. He died six days later after his right lung was destroyed. It took three decades for anyone to face trial over his death.
Davis, a member of the Southside Compton Crips, has given numerous public accounts of the night in a memoir, documentary appearances and interviews, which prosecutors say amount to an admission of involvement. He claims his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, was beaten by Shakur’s entourage earlier that night in retaliation for a mall brawl between Crips and Bloods, and that this triggered the shooting.
According to Davis’s account, his group pulled alongside the car carrying Shakur and Death Row Records boss Suge Knight on East Flamingo Road. Knight, who was driving, was grazed in the head but survived. Davis has alleged Anderson fired the shots, though he says shots came from his own vehicle only after Knight or Shakur raised a weapon, a claim investigators dispute, noting no cartridge cases or weapons were found in Knight’s car. Anderson denied involvement and was killed in an unrelated gang shooting in 1998. Davis is the only surviving occupant of the vehicle linked to the shooting.
Prosecutors argue that statements Davis made in a 2018 documentary, in interviews and in his 2019 book Compton Street Legend mirror what he told police during earlier “proffer” interviews, statements normally inadmissible unless repeated elsewhere. A judge ruled the proffer material can be used against him at trial. Davis has since claimed the book was largely the work of ghostwriters.
The case has renewed attention on the rivalry between East Coast and West Coast rap in the mid-1990s and its entanglement with gang culture, following Shakur’s move to Death Row Records under Knight. Shakur’s rival, Christopher Wallace, known as The Notorious B.I.G., was killed in a similarly unsolved drive-by shooting in Los Angeles less than a year later; no one has been charged in that case.
Shakur, who sold more records than any rapper of his era and appeared in several films, had survived an earlier shooting in New York in 1994 and was serving time for a sexual abuse conviction when he was released on bail arranged by Knight in exchange for a three-album deal. His trial is expected to last four to six weeks.
•Featured image: Rapper Tupac Shakur poses for photos backstage after his performance at the Regal Theater in Chicago, in March 1994/Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images