Who killed Tupac? What to know about the trial of Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis

The Trial of Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis: A 30-Year-Old Mystery Finally Gets Closure

The trial of Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis, a 63-year-old man accused of orchestrating the 1996 killing of rapper Tupac Shakur, is set to begin on Monday in Las Vegas. Davis is charged with one count of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang. Prosecutors aim to prove it was Davis who orchestrated Tupac’s killing by supplying the gun – but they are not claiming he pulled the trigger.

Tupac Amaru Shakur, known popularly as Tupac or 2Pac, was a California-based rapper who became an icon of the genre during a short but glittering career in the 1990s. He released several Billboard-topping albums throughout his career, and more posthumously. The rapper’s music drew heavily on his experiences of violence on the streets of California, as well as themes of gang life, single motherhood, love and romance, civil rights, and racism and police violence in America.

Tupac was involved in gang violence. He had previously survived another shooting before being fatally wounded in a drive-by attack in Nevada on September 7, 1996. He died six days later. He was 25.

The trial of Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis is happening entirely because of Davis’s own words. His 2019 memoir – titled Compton Street Legend – opens in Las Vegas on the night of Tupac’s killing, and Davis explains in detail how he hunted the rapper and Marion ‘Suge’ Knight through the city over the fight involving his nephew. He wrote that he got a gun, entered a Cadillac with three others and drove around looking for Tupac and Knight. They spotted Tupac in a car and then pulled up next to it, he wrote. ‘No words exchanged, the time for talking had passed, the s*** was about to go down!’ his memoir reads.

Davis has spoken in granular detail about the night Tupac was shot, including revealing he thought that Knight had been killed in the first shot, which streets he and the others in the car waited on to find Tupac, and who played what role in the attack that night. He has not named who fired the gun.

The trial starts on Monday and is expected to last four to six weeks. Its outcome hinges on Davis’s own admissions in his books and in tell-all interviews released since his memoir was published. Davis’s defence tried unsuccessfully to have his memoir excluded from the trial. Under Nevada law, Davis can be charged with murder if he is found to have orchestrated Tupac’s killing, even if it was not him who pulled the trigger.

Prosecutors expect to call between 35 and 45 people to the stand, including police, technical witnesses and associates of both Tupac and Davis. Knight is one of the few people directly involved in the incident to still be alive.