The man accused of killing legendary rapper Tupac Shakur — one of the entertainment industry’s most captivating crimes — was found guilty by a Nevada jury.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, learned his fate in a Las Vegas courtroom on Monday after about two weeks of trial.
The conviction of Davis, a former high-ranking “shot caller” in a Los Angeles chapter of the Crips gang, marked the first person to face justice for Shakur’s murder, which went down on a Las Vegas street on the night of Sept. 7, 1996.
Shakur, a pioneer of the burgeoning rap scene, was driving in a car when another pulled up alongside and blasted him with a hail of bullets. He died days later at 25.
Davis was not accused of shooting the gun which killed Shakur, but prosecutors argued he gave it to the gunman — long presumed to be his nephew Orlando Anderson, who died in a gang shootout two years after the murder — and orchestrated the entire attack.
They came to that conclusion largely from Davis’ own words — he apparently owned up to it while trying to dodge potential charges in 2008, and later detailed the entire plot in a 2019 memoir that ended up leading straight to his 2023 arrest.
Davis’ defense, however, argued those admissions were pure falsehoods — with attorney Michael Sanft characterizing the memoir as historical fiction, even going so far to compare it to the movie “Titanic.”
“Has anybody seen the documentary called ‘Titanic,’ with Jack and Rose?” Sanft jibed during closing statements.
But prosecutors argued Davis’ own statements were just the icing on the cake — saying the case was “drenched with circumstantial evidence” placing him in the middle of the crime.
His nephew had been beaten up by Shakur — said to be affiliated with a rival Blood gang — just hours before the killing, which prosecutors argued necessitated a violent response by unspoken gangland rules.
“That was the nature of the gang life in the 1990s in Compton – you had no choice, you could not go back to Compton after being beaten publicly,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal said during his closing arguments.
That response was organized by an enraged Davis, who Palal said “got a gun and went hunting for Tupac Shakur.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
