A Las Vegas jury convicted Duane “Keffe D” Davis on Monday of murder with use of a deadly weapon in connection with the 1996 drive-by shooting death of Tupac Shakur. The jury deliberated for only a few hours before returning the guilty verdict, marking a resolution to one of music’s most notorious unsolved killings.
Davis, 63, a former South Side Compton Crips member, was arrested in September 2023. Prosecutors argued he orchestrated the September 7, 1996 shooting as gang retaliation for a beating of his nephew, Orlando Anderson, that occurred approximately two hours earlier inside the MGM Grand casino. The beating involved Shakur, Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight, and others, according to court testimony.
The centerpiece of the prosecution’s case was a recorded 2008 police interview in which Davis described his role in the shooting in detail. Davis stated he was in the front passenger seat of a white Cadillac when it pulled alongside a BMW carrying Knight and Shakur near Flamingo Road and Koval Lane. Davis said he passed a loaded .40-caliber Glock to the back seat, where his nephew Anderson allegedly opened fire. Shakur was struck multiple times and died six days later at age 25. Knight was wounded but survived.
The defense argued Davis fabricated the account to gain leverage in an unrelated narcotics case and that inconsistencies in his various retellings undermined the prosecution’s case. Defense attorney Michael Sanft pointed to discrepancies between Davis’s claims and evidence presented at trial, including a passage in Davis’s memoir about a Chrysler Sebring being struck by gunfire—a claim contradicted by a witness who testified the vehicle was never hit.
Prosecutors countered that Davis repeatedly told consistent versions of the same story over years and that his 2008 account was corroborated by other evidence. Former Los Angeles police Detective Daryn Dupree testified that Davis first volunteered his involvement while being questioned about the 1997 killing of rapper Christopher Wallace, known as the Notorious B.I.G.
Davis remains jailed pending sentencing on October 13, where he faces up to life in prison. Orlando Anderson, long considered a suspect in Shakur’s killing, denied involvement before his death in an unrelated Compton shooting in 1998 at age 23.
Source: Rolling Stone
