Tupac Shakur Murder Trial Opens 30 Years After Rapper’s Death: ‘An Act of Revenge’

Jurors will decide whether Duane "Keffe D" Davis played a role in the deadly drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur in September 1996

Three decades after the 1996 drive-by shooting of hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas, a prosecutor gave jurors an unflinching account of the killing on Monday, accusing Duane “Keffe D” Davis of organizing the attack as “an act of revenge.”

In his opening statement on the first day of Davis’ murder trial, Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors they would not have to take the state’s word for it. Davis, he said, had described his own role in a “secret 2008 interview” with authorities.

He played snippets of the interview as Davis, dressed in a blue suit and tie, looked at a screen in the courtroom. In the recording, Davis described making a U-turn and pulling up alongside a black BMW carrying Shakur and Suge Knight near the Las Vegas Strip and handing a gun to a person in the back seat before shots rang out, according to a livestream of the trial from CourtTV.

“Duane Davis says if they were on his side of the vehicle, he would have shot them himself,” Palal tells the jury. Instead, it was Davis’ “beloved nephew” Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson in the backseat who fired the gun. He said the motive was Davis’ “visceral anger” over Shakur getting in a fistfight with Anderson inside the MGM Grand after a Mike Tyson boxing match hours earlier.

“Duane Davis did not pull the trigger. But what he did do was plan the retaliation for the beating of his nephew. You will learn that Duane Davis got the gun. You will learn that he got into a white Cadillac. You will learn when the opportunity presented itself for retribution, Duane Davis made sure that the shooters are armed and ready to execute their revenge. And remarkably, you will learn that from Duane Davis himself,” Palal said.

In his dueling opening statement, Davis’ defense lawyer Michael Sanft asked jurors why his client was never charged after his alleged confession to authorities in 2008. “It’s because they knew he was full of crap, otherwise they would have. Why wouldn’t they?” Sanft said.

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The lawyer also questioned why investigators failed to conduct follow-up interviews to try to corroborate what Davis said. “Is it because they just didn’t care about Tupac Shakur or his life? Or is it because they looked into it and realized, we can’t verify this information, we don’t believe this is even true,” he said.

Sanft suggested Davis wasn’t even in Vegas the night of the shooting. He said investigators never recovered any receipts, credit card transactions, or even a picture of Davis at the MGM Grand that night, though he claimed in his book he was near the front of the Tyson bout, seated near celebrities. “When you look at this relevant timeline again, and you see the length of time, ask yourself what facts do they have to even put Keffe D in a car in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996.”

Davis, 63, has pleaded not guilty to a single murder count and has been held without bail since his arrest in September 2023. He and his lawyers claim he left gang life and the drug trade in 2008 and moved on to lawful employment as an oil refinery inspector before becoming a retired grandfather and cancer survivor living a quiet life with his wife in a Vegas suburb.

Prosecutors allege Davis orchestrated Shakur’s drive-by shooting on Sept. 7, 1996 by supplying the .40-caliber Glock pistol that also wounded Knight, co-founder of Death Row Records. Shakur was rushed to a hospital but died from his wounds six days later at age 25. His slaying became one of the biggest unsolved murders in Las Vegas history, with investigators, fans, and even Davis linking it to the violent East Coast-West Coast rap industry war that pitted Knight’s label in California against Bad Boy Records and its CEO Sean Combs in New York.

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Police never found the Glock or the rented white Cadillac that allegedly ferried Davis and the shooter that night. Rival hip-hop star Christopher Wallace, known as The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls, was killed in a subsequent drive-by shooting in Los Angeles in 1997.

In a 2019 memoir, Davis detailed his rise in the South Side Crips and acknowledged signing a federal cooperation agreement tied to a drug case in Los Angeles. During his 2008 interview with law enforcement played in court on Monday, he claimed Combs had offered $1 million to have Knight and Shakur killed amid a feud. (Combs has vehemently denied the allegation.) Davis said an associate named Eric “Zip” Martin supplied the gun that he passed into the back seat of the Cadillac, where Anderson allegedly used it to open fire. Davis said he was never paid any money.

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While prosecutors allege Davis’ tell-all memoir and interviews are confessions in the case, the defense insists they were pure showmanship. His lawyers say they were “entertainment” meant to generate profit. In filings, they compared the public’s cultural fixation on Shakur’s death to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, arguing it was easy to see why someone might falsely place himself at the center for personal gain.

Before his shooting death in Compton in 1998, Anderson denied any role in Shakur’s death.