Nearly 30 years after Tupac Shakur was shot dead on the Las Vegas Strip, the man accused of orchestrating the killing went on trial this week, with jurors hearing dueling accounts of one of hip-hop's most notorious unsolved cases. Opening statements in the murder trial of Duane "Keffe D" Davis, 63, began Monday in Clark County, according to CBS News.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors Davis did not fire the fatal shots but planned the drive-by in retaliation after Shakur's entourage beat Davis's nephew, Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, at the MGM Grand hours earlier. "Duane Davis got the gun. You will learn that he got into a white Cadillac," Palal said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Davis has pleaded not guilty to murder with a deadly weapon and faces life in prison if convicted.
Decades-Old Case, New Evidence
Shakur, 25, was riding in a BMW with Death Row Records founder Marion "Suge" Knight on September 7, 1996, when gunfire from a passing car struck him; he died six days later. No arrests came for nearly three decades until Davis was indicted in 2023, after prosecutors said his own public statements — including a 2019 memoir describing tossing a gun into the getaway car — gave them grounds to charge him.
Defense attorney Michael Sanft dismissed the prosecution's theory as "fiction" built on unreliable, decades-old admissions rather than physical evidence. Retired Las Vegas police officer Garry Dale, who rode in the ambulance with Shakur, testified that the rapper refused to identify his shooter, telling officers "we'll take care of it." A second witness, retired homicide detective Brent Becker, described early investigative setbacks, including a leaked autopsy photograph and a guarded, lawyer-accompanied interview with Knight that left him skeptical of Knight's account.
Prosecutors have said they intend to call between 35 and 45 witnesses over a trial expected to last up to six weeks before Judge Carli Kierny, while the defense plans to call only a handful. Whoever fired the shots that killed Shakur is not expected to be conclusively identified at trial; Davis is the only person ever charged in the case.
