Duane Keith Davis, known as “Keffe D,” has been indicted by a grand jury on charges of murder using a deadly weapon in relation to the 1996 death of rapper Tupac Shakur, according to Las Vegas officials. Davis, 60, was taken into custody in Las Vegas on Friday morning. His wife’s residence in Henderson was searched in July as part of the ongoing investigation into Shakur’s murder.
Shakur was fatally shot while leaving a boxing match on the Las Vegas Strip. His premature death at the age of 25 has sparked numerous conspiracy theories and a decades-long investigation. At a news conference on Friday, authorities portrayed Davis as the mastermind behind a plot to murder Shakur in retaliation for an attack on his nephew. Davis has consistently claimed to have been present at the crime scene, stating that he was in the front seat of the white Cadillac that pulled up next to Shakur’s car when shots were fired from the back seat, resulting in the rapper’s death. Shakur was shot four times and succumbed to his injuries six days later.
“For 27 years, the family of Tupac Shakur has been waiting for justice,” stated Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Kevin McMahill at the news conference. “The investigation started on the night of September 7th, 1996,” McMahill continued. “It is far from over. It has taken countless hours, really decades, of work by the men and women of our homicide section to get to where we are today.”
Jason Johansson, the police department’s homicide lieutenant, described the murder as a “retaliatory” attack following a conflict between two gangs based in Compton, California. Shakur and Marion “Suge” Knight, the former CEO of Death Row Records, were affiliated with the Mob Piru gang in Compton, while Davis was affiliated with the Southside Compton Crips, according to Johansson.
Shakur was in Las Vegas to watch Mike Tyson box at the MGM Grand Hotel. Members of the Southside Compton Crips, including Davis and his nephew Orlando Anderson, also attended the event. As both groups were leaving the fight, members of Death Row Records spotted Orlando Anderson near an elevator bank inside the MGM and began to assault him near the elevator bank, Johansson explained, showing hotel surveillance footage of the fight. Shakur and Knight were visible among the men who attacked Anderson.
Both groups left the hotel, with Shakur and his crew headed to a post-fight after-party at a local nightclub. Upon learning about the attack on Anderson, Davis “began to devise a plan to obtain a firearm and retaliate against Suge Knight and Mr. Shakur,” according to Johansson. After acquiring a gun from a “close associate,” Davis joined Terrence Brown, Deandre Smith, and Anderson in a white Cadillac.
“At some point in time, as they were in the white Cadillac, Mr. Davis took the gun that he had obtained and provided it to the passengers in the rear seat of the vehicle,” Johansson said. The indictment does not specify which man in the back seat fired the shots. The group located the black BMW in which Shakur and Knight were riding, opened fire through the window, and immediately fled the scene, authorities said.
“Duane Davis was the shot-caller for this group of individuals that committed this crime. He orchestrated the plan that was carried out to commit this crime,” said Johansson. All the other individuals associated with the crime are dead, he added, including Anderson, who denied his involvement with the murder to CNN before his death in a gang-related shooting in 1998.
Johansson stated that police have long known the sequence of events that night, but lacked sufficient evidence to proceed with the case. The decades-long quest to officially solve the case was “reinvigorated” in 2018, according to Johansson. Davis’ own admissions regarding the crime were a crucial piece of the investigation, he said.
When police searched Davis’ wife’s home in July, they seized a copy of the memoir Davis authored detailing street gang life and the murder of Shakur. In the memoir, Davis describes himself as one of only two living witnesses to Shakur’s shooting, the other being Knight, who is now serving time in prison for manslaughter in an unrelated case.
Davis had confessed to the crime to police in 2009, but the information was unable to be used, according to a former police detective who investigated the case. “We sat him down back in 2009, and he confessed to his role in the murder along with other coconspirators,” Greg Kading told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Friday. However, Davis “had a proffer agreement, so we couldn’t utilize that information that he was providing against him,” Kading said.
Tupac’s stepbrother, Mopreme Shakur, who is also a rapper, said news of Davis’ arrest is “bittersweet.” “We have been through decades of pain. They have known about this guy, who been running his mouth, for years,” he said. “So why now?” he said. “For us, this is not over. We want to know why, and if there were any accomplices.”Indictment in 1996 Tupac Shakur Murder