Tupac Murder Suspect to Face Trial Next Year

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the former street gang leader charged with the murder of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas in 1996, will stand trial on June 3, a Nevada judge ruled on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

Davis was first arrested and charged with murder at the end of September, almost exactly 27 years after Shakur was fatally shot in a drive-by shooting. Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight, imprisoned in 2018 over an unrelated manslaughter conviction, was also in the car with Shakur and was wounded.

Police said that Davis wasn’t the triggerman in the killing but that he was the leader of the group that perpetrated the murder. Davis is the only surviving suspect left in the case. Davis’s nephew, Orlando Anderson, the suspected shooter in the case, died in a shootout two years after Shakur was killed. Two other suspects, Terry Brown and Deandrae Smith, also died before they were ever charged.

Davis pleaded not guilty last week, and he avoided a possible death penalty conviction after the state decided not to pursue it. Los Angeles and Las Vegas Police had been investigating Shakur’s killing for nearly 30 years.

Davis himself had said in several interviews that he was at the crime scene, saying in an episode of BET’s Death Row Chronicles in 2018 that he knew who killed Shakur but that he was “going to keep it for the code of the streets.” Davis also wrote about the killing in his memoir Compton Street Legend in 2019. In the book, Davis recalled Shakur reaching down in the car for a gun, “and that’s when the fireworks started,” Davis wrote. “One of my guys from the back seat grabbed the Glock and started bustin’ back.”

By July of 2023, LVMPD searched Davis’s home as part of the investigation, and he was arrested three months later. Davis remains jailed in Las Vegas ahead of the trial, though as the AP reports, Davis’s attorneys are seeking his release on bail before the trial.