NEARLY three decades after Tupac Shakur was gunned down in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting, the former street gang leader accused of masterminding the killing is set to face opening statements in a murder trial that could last up to six weeks.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, is charged in Clark County, Nevada, with one count of murder with a deadly weapon. He has pleaded not guilty.
Reuters reported on Monday that Davis is accused of leading a group of men in a plot to kill Shakur, one of the most commercially successful and influential figures in hip-hop, after a confrontation involving the rapper and Davis’ nephew at the MGM Grand casino on September 7, 1996.
Shakur, 25, was shot four times as he travelled in a car driven by Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight near the Las Vegas Strip.
He died in hospital six days later. Knight suffered a minor injury after a bullet fragment grazed his head.
The killing became one of the defining tragedies of hip-hop’s “gangsta” rap era, deepening perceptions of violence within the culture and intensifying the bitter East Coast-West Coast rivalry that dominated rap at the time.
Police arrested Davis in 2023, saying he had long been considered a suspect but that investigators had lacked sufficient admissible evidence to charge him until he made a series of public statements implicating himself.
The trial, before Judge Carli Kierny, is expected to run for up to six weeks at a downtown Las Vegas courthouse. A jury was selected last week.
Knight, who was with Shakur when he was killed and is now serving a 28-year prison sentence for an unrelated voluntary manslaughter conviction, could be called to testify.
Prosecutors have described Davis as the “shot caller” who organised a retaliatory attack following the beating of his nephew by Shakur and members of the rapper’s entourage at the MGM Grand.
The confrontation allegedly arose from tensions between two Los Angeles-area street gangs — the South Side Compton Crips, of which Davis described himself as a leader, and the Mob Piru group, which authorities have associated with Knight and Death Row Records.
The groups were in Las Vegas to attend a world heavyweight boxing match between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon then.
Authorities allege Davis obtained the murder weapon and handed it to one of two men sitting in the rear of a white Cadillac as they searched for the vehicle carrying Shakur and Knight following the casino confrontation.
When the Cadillac caught up with their car, shots were fired.
Davis’ role in the shooting has been central to the long-running investigation, although neither his own accounts nor the authorities have identified him as the person who pulled the trigger.
The three other men who were in the Cadillac with Davis have since died.
Under Nevada law, prosecutors do not have to prove that Davis personally fired the fatal shots if they establish that he participated in the killing.
The case remained dormant for years before statements Davis made to various media outlets in 2018 helped revive the investigation.
In interviews and in his 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend”, Davis said he was sitting in the front passenger seat of the Cadillac and had passed the gun to one of the men in the back, according to police.
Davis also wrote that he had long been regarded as a suspect in both Shakur’s killing and the murder of rival rapper Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G.
Wallace, who was signed to New York-based Bad Boy Entertainment, was shot dead in Los Angeles in March 1997, six months after Shakur’s death.
His killing also remains unsolved, although investigators have long speculated that Wallace was murdered in retaliation for Shakur’s killing.
The trial now brings one of hip-hop’s most enduring murder mysteries into a Nevada courtroom, almost 30 years after the shooting that ended Shakur’s life. - August 17, 2026
