Duane “Keffe D” Davis reportedly arrested early Friday morning in connection to 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur
Twenty-seven years after the passing of rapper Tupac Shakur, a Las Vegas-area grand jury has formally charged a man with the iconic artist’s murder, as confirmed by 8 News Now Investigators on Friday.
The Clark County grand jury indicted Duane “Keffe D” Davis on a murder charge involving a deadly weapon with a gang enhancement. Las Vegas Metro police arrested Davis in the early hours of Friday, according to prosecutors.
In his book and numerous interviews, Davis, now in his 60s, has admitted to being in the car with the individual who shot Shakur and record executive Suge Knight near the Las Vegas Strip in September 1996. Shakur succumbed to his injuries six days later.
During the grand jury hearing on Friday, Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo stated that Davis’ public statements directly linked him to the crime, alleging that Davis had ordered Shakur’s assassination.
In July, Las Vegas Metro police conducted a search at a Henderson home as part of the ongoing investigation, as initially reported by 8 News Now Investigators. The search near Interstate 11 and Wagon Wheel Drive involved seizing documents, personal items, and ammunition belonging to Davis.
Additionally, police confiscated photographs and electronic devices. Neighbors informed 8 News Now that a relative of Davis resided in the house, although Davis’s name and the home’s address were listed on the warrant.
Videos of the July 17 raid show police talking to two people as they exit the home. The man in the videos appears to be Davis.
The shooting of Shakur at the intersection of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane followed a fight earlier in the night. In the hours before the murder, Shakur’s group reportedly attacked Orlando Anderson, a member of a rival gang.
Davis has said he and Anderson were in the car that pulled side-by-side to Shakur’s after the fight. Someone in the back seat then fired a gun, Davis said.
Anderson died in a shooting in 1998. Davis has publicly said he is Anderson’s uncle. No one else who was in the shooter’s car, except for Davis, was believed to be living.
Davis made several public statements about the night of the shooting, including in TV interviews and in a 2019 book titled “Compton Street Legend: Notorious Keffe D’s Street-Level Accounts of Tupac and Biggie Murders, Death Row Origins, Suge Knight, Puffy Combs, and Crooked Cops.”
“Tupac made an erratic move and began to reach down beneath his seat,” Davis writes in the book. “It was the first and only time in my life that I could relate to the police command, ‘Keep your hands where I can see them.’ Instead, Pac pulled out a strap, and that’s when the fireworks started. One of my guys from the back seat grabbed the Glock and started bustin’ back.”
“When we pulled up, I was in the front seat,” Davis said in a 2018 BET interview. “Happen to see my friend, Suge.”
“You said the shots came from the back,” the interviewer asks Davis in the BET video. “Who shot Tupac?”
“Going to keep it for the code of the streets,” Davis said. “It just came from the backseat, bro.”
It was unclear Friday why the case was suddenly moving ahead after more than two decades.
“The older your case gets as a prosecutor, the weaker your case gets,” former Clark County prosecutor Thomas Moskal said. “Witnesses, they go missing, they leave, they die, their memories fade. Evidence isn’t preserved. You can’t go back and now start retesting things from the crime scene. if something wasn’t done, it wasn’t done.”
Moskal said he expected prosecutors to use Davis’s own statements against him.
“They have his own statements saying he was there,” Moskal said. “He’s going to have to make the argument that either, ‘I wasn’t there and I lied the whole time’ or ‘I didn’t know what was going on and I lied the whole time.’ But how do you overcome that? Basically he would have to take that stand and say, ‘I lied before believe me now.’”
Davis refers to himself as “Keffe D” in his book. He is sometimes also referred to as “Keefe D” or “Keefy D.”
There is no statute of limitations for when prosecutors can file murder charges in Nevada. Police have never filed charges in connection with Shakur’s murder.
Police arrested Davis early Friday morning, prosecutors said. He was being held without bail.
Davis was expected to appear in court Wednesday for his arraignment.
