For nearly three decades, Tupac Shakur’s murder lived everywhere except a courtroom.
It lived in documentaries and books, police files and conspiracy theories, rap lyrics and street lore. It lived in grainy interviews, old grudges, whispered accusations and endless arguments over who was inside the white Cadillac that rolled alongside the BMW carrying one of the most recognizable young Black men in America.
On Monday, 12 jurors in Las Vegas finally put a legal answer behind one part of the mystery.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the former gang leader who spent years publicly describing his role in the events surrounding Shakur’s killing, was convicted of first-degree murder in the Sept. 7, 1996, drive-by shooting. Jurors deliberated for roughly three hours before finding the 63-year-old guilty. Davis now faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.
“Justice has finally caught up with Duane “Keffe D” Davis,” one social media user wrote.
The verdict arrived nearly 30 years after gunfire ripped through the passenger side of a black BMW stopped near the Las Vegas Strip.
Shakur was 25.
He was struck four times and died six days later.
Davis was not accused of firing those bullets. Prosecutors said he supplied the gun and helped set the killing in motion after Shakur and members of his entourage attacked Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, inside the MGM Grand following a Mike Tyson fight earlier that evening. Under Nevada law, prosecutors did not have to prove Davis pulled the trigger to hold him responsible for the murder.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors that Davis acquired a weapon and “went hunting” for Shakur and Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight.
The hunt, prosecutors said, ended when the Cadillac carrying Davis and three other men encountered Knight’s BMW.
The Cadillac turned around.
A gun was passed, then came the bullets.
Knight was wounded and Shakur never left the hospital alive.
For years, the case seemed destined to remain one of American music’s most notorious unsolved murders. There was no recovered murder weapon. The Cadillac disappeared. The other three men authorities identified as occupants of the car died before Davis ever stood trial.
Davis kept talking.
He talked in interviews. He talked for documentaries. He described the night in his 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend.” He acknowledged being in the Cadillac and described obtaining the gun and handing it toward the back seat.
Those words eventually followed him into court.
“I never thought this case would be closed but here we are, incredible that he just couldn’t shut up about [it] and fade away,” one social media user wrote in response to news of the ruling.
‘Finally After 30 Years, Someone is Held Accountable‘
Police said Davis had long been a suspect but lacked sufficient evidence to charge him until his public accounts helped revive the investigation. Prosecutors turned those interviews, recordings and writings against him, arguing that the man sitting at the defense table had spent years supplying pieces of his own prosecution.
His attorneys tried to convince jurors that Davis had built a profitable legend around himself.
They argued that his stories amounted to exaggeration and bravado, that prosecutors could not overcome the physical holes left by three decades, and that a man talking about a famous murder was not the same thing as proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed one.
RJ Bond, a filmmaker and longtime researcher of the Shakur case, raised that very issue before the trial began.
“I think actually the biggest misconception that people have in the case is that there’s actually any evidence,” Bond told The Washington Informer earlier this month. “There’s no gun, there’s no car, there’s no witnesses.”
Bond, director and producer of the docuseries “Tupac: Cover-Up,” had studied the killing for nearly two decades and assisted Davis’ defense team without pay. He argued that Davis’ repeated public statements had created enormous legal problems for him but questioned whether prosecutors could independently corroborate enough of what Davis said.
“He’s his own worst enemy,” Bond said.
Monday’s jury decided those words, combined with the prosecution’s other evidence, were enough.
The conviction closes the criminal case against the only person ever charged in Shakur’s killing, but it does not magically answer every question that has accumulated since September 1996.
Authorities have never established in court who actually squeezed the trigger.
Anderson, Davis’ nephew and long considered a suspect, denied killing Shakur before he was himself shot to death in Compton in 1998.
The other men police said occupied the Cadillac are also dead.
The murder weapon remains missing, but what survived was Davis and his voice.
His defense attorney argued during closing arguments that Davis’ memoir was fiction rather than fact. Prosecutors countered that Davis had repeatedly described his participation over many years, in different settings and for different audiences.
That left jurors with an unusual murder case: a killing from another century, missing physical evidence, dead witnesses and a defendant whose own storytelling became central to deciding his fate.
“Finally after 30 years, someone is held accountable,” a social media user wrote on X.
The cultural weight surrounding the trial was impossible to separate from the man whose death brought everyone into the courtroom, because Shakur was already a phenomenon when he was killed.
“2Pacalypse Now,” “Strictly 4 My N.I.G.-. -.Z.,” “Me Against the World” and “All Eyez on Me” had turned him into something larger than a successful recording artist. He could sound furious, wounded, tender, paranoid, political and prophetic, sometimes inside the same song.
His contradictions became part of his permanence. He rapped about police brutality and poverty, Black women and Black survival. He also embraced the violent theatricality surrounding Death Row Records and became consumed by the East Coast-West Coast hostility that helped define the darkest stretch of 1990s hip-hop.
Death froze him at 25.
There would be no middle-aged Tupac. No gray-haired Tupac. No opportunity for the artist who recorded “Keep Ya Head Up” (1993), “Dear Mama” (1995), “California Love” (1995), “Hail Mary” (1996) and “Changes” (recorded in 1992 and released posthumously in 1998) to tell the world what he thought of the decades that followed him.
His mother, Afeni Shakur, spent the remainder of her life protecting her son’s legacy before dying in 2016.
She never saw anyone prosecuted for his murder.
On Monday, Shakur’s sister, Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur, sat inside the Las Vegas courtroom as the verdict was announced. She cried and reached behind her toward someone seated nearby. Across the courtroom, Davis’ son covered his face with one hand.
Two families absorbed opposite meanings from the same words. Guilty.
Before the trial, Shakur’s cousin William Lesane said his family wanted something far simpler than another theory about what happened that September night.
“Hopefully we’ll find out some new information,” Lesane stated. “And more importantly, the right person is charged and convicted for Tupac’s murder.”
The jury has now spoken on that question.
Davis’ conviction cannot return the 25-year-old man who climbed into Knight’s BMW after watching Tyson fight Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand. It cannot recover the missing gun or interrogate the dead men police said were riding inside the Cadillac.
For decades, one of hip-hop’s greatest mysteries survived because witnesses disappeared, memories faded and evidence vanished. Then the last surviving man prosecutors said was inside the Cadillac kept telling the story himself.
Bond offered two words before the trial that, after Monday’s verdict, sound almost like an epitaph for the mystery that consumed generations of Tupac fans.
“Facts matter.”
