After three decades, a murder trial brings focus back to the legacy of Tupac Shakur

By Andy Rose, CNN

(CNN) — About 10,000 people were in the arena watching. One of them was Tupac Shakur, the number one-selling rapper who had already become a hip-hop icon at the age of 25.

Away from the ring on September 7, 1996, a bicoastal beef that had been brewing for years in the music industry was about to reach its tragic apogee. Hours after Tyson’s left hook sent Seldon face-first to the mat, Shakur was hit by four bullets in his vehicle – a drive-by shooting just off the Vegas Strip. Tupac’s right lung was destroyed. After six days on life support, he was pronounced dead.

It took 109 seconds to settle the boxing match. It has taken 30 years for anyone to face trial over Shakur’s murder.

Jury selection starts today for Duane Keith Davis – known as Keffe D – who was indicted in 2023 on one count of murder with a deadly weapon in Tupac Shakur’s death. Davis, 63, has entered a not guilty plea. Prosecutors do not claim he fired the fatal shots. They say Davis orchestrated the killing in retaliation for an assault on his nephew shortly after the Tyson fight.

Shakur’s death – and the similar drive-by murder of his rival Christopher Wallace, better known as Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G., less than a year later – put an uncomfortable light on the increasingly angry rivalry between East Coast and West Coast rap and whether artistic disputes were turning into violent real-world battles. Now, the Keffe D case is exposing just how deeply gang culture had become embedded in the industry’s embrace of the gangsta lifestyle, embodied in an artist whose work both lamented the violence that cut many young Black lives short while also glorifying it.

“He was working through his trauma with his art, his music, his poetry,” said former MTV journalist Abbie Kearse, who interviewed Shakur in 1994, “and yes, the anger comes out in real life, too, through violence.”

Shakur enters the music scene, both sensitive and powerful

Tupac Shakur wasn’t just about beats and rhymes. Coming up from a rough childhood with an absent father and addicted mother, Vanity Fair reported, Shakur combined a love of hip-hop and other performing arts with classical poetry and Shakespeare.

“Look at Romeo and Juliet,” he told the Los Angeles Times a year before his death. “That’s some serious ghetto sh*t.”

After moving from the East Coast to Northern California, he joined the largely apolitical, party-focused group Digital Underground, where he first adopted the name 2Pac and served primarily as a dancer. But he had much bigger plans ahead.

Recording tracks in his spare time, Shakur secured a solo record deal. The hype man for the group best known for “Humpty Dance” released 2Pacalypse Now, a politically conscious album touching on urban violence and police brutality. After a slow start, it was eventually certified gold.

Over the course of his next studio albums, Shakur’s work ran the gamut from a sensitive ode to his mother (“Dear Mama”) to “So Many Tears,” a sad reflection on “so many homies in the cemetery.”

The former student of the Baltimore School of the Arts also became a critically praised actor in films alongside Janet Jackson and Omar Epps, earning his first role in “Juice” on the strength of his own magnetism after crashing a friend’s audition. Three films starring Shakur were released after his death.

But outside the studio and off-camera, his rising success was accompanied by repeated legal battles and violent encounters.

Legal troubles send Shakur down dangerous path

Tupac was charged with shooting two off-duty police officers during a scuffle in Atlanta in 1993. Those charges were eventually dropped.

The following year, Shakur faced his most serious allegations, convicted of sexually abusing a fan during a hotel encounter he said was consensual, The New York Times reported.

During jury deliberations, Tupac dropped by a New York recording studio at the invitation of a producer to contribute to a track. He was held up in the lobby and shot five times while trying to get away.

After undergoing surgery, he left the hospital against doctors’ advice, the Los Angeles Times reported, to appear at his sexual abuse sentencing in a wheelchair, his left hand bandaged and the left side of his face swollen.

Sentenced to a minimum of 18 months in prison, Shakur appealed and reached a deal with Marion “Suge” Knight – cofounder and head of Death Row Records, the top hip-hop distributor on the West Coast – getting the label to front his bail money while the appeal was pending in exchange for a three-album deal, record executive Leslie Gerard told New Yorker journalist Sheldon Pearce.

Still stinging emotionally from the recording studio shooting and assault case that both happened in New York and Shakur feared were setups, Knight told Kearse a week after Shakur’s death that Tupac had more than a financial connection to Death Row.

“Tupac loved Death Row,” he said. “Tupac loved me. I loved him.”

That connection is ultimately what put Tupac’s life in jeopardy, Davis argued in the book Compton Street Legend, which has become a key piece of evidence in the case against him. Davis, a member of the Crips, says Shakur’s relationship with Knight caught him up in the Los Angeles gang turf battles that had become woven into the rap game. The Crips were tight with Bad Boy Records on the East Coast, while the Bloods, he said, supported and protected the Death Row music organization.

“At Death Row especially, there was no question about the gang affiliations,” said Kearse.

“Tupac mistakenly thought Suge and the Death Row crew they were rolling with were untouchable and would protect him,” Davis wrote. “He seemed to have lost touch with the reality of the streets that everyone can be touched.”

His fresh association with Death Row also brought a new sound to Tupac’s repertoire reminiscent of the label’s breakout stars, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.

Shakur quickly took to the intensity of the coastal rivalry, blasting his former friend Biggie Smalls, also known as The Notorious B.I.G., and Bad Boy’s top producer Sean “Puffy” Combs in “Hit ‘Em Up,” one of rap’s most unambiguously brutal diss tracks that took on almost all of East Coast rap royalty by name.

With a “THUG LIFE” tattoo emblazoned in an arc above his navel – the letter “i” replaced by a bullet casing – the Tupac of “Dear Mama” seemed to be in the rear view, at least publicly.

“It was very problematic to try to decipher which is his real life and which is fictionalized, you know,” Kearse told CNN. “I don’t know.”

Chain of events leading to murder started at a mall, suspect said

Davis and his crew of Southside Compton Crips went to Las Vegas on the night of the boxing match strictly for recreation, not for trouble, he wrote. But the group was set off when Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, was attacked at the MGM shortly after the fight.

Word got to Davis that Anderson had been beaten by Tupac and his entourage in retaliation for an incident at a shopping mall where a group of Bloods were beaten by Crips in what Davis described as “another day” of back-and-forth violence between the gangs.

“We kept it moving, but there’s one thing that’s for sure when living that gangster lifestyle, you already know that the stuff you put out is going to come back to you,” Davis wrote of the mall incident. “You never know how or when, but there’s never a doubt that it’s coming.”

For Shakur, Davis said it came after the Tyson fight, when the white Cadillac Davis said he was riding in sidled up to the black BMW driven by Suge Knight on East Flamingo Road.

Lead suspect ‘talked himself right into jail’

For such a complicated case, Keffe D’s defense is remarkably simple: You can’t trust what he says.

“I would definitely say he’s a liar,” Davis’ then-defense attorney, Carl Arnold, said to Las Vegas television station KLAS in 2024. Arnold left the defense team a year later, CNN affiliate KSNV reported.

Davis now says the book was a work of fiction, one he attached his name to strictly for the money.

“That was the ghostwriters (who) did it. I didn’t write that book,” Davis told KLAS in a jailhouse interview last month, noting its incongruous mention of a quote from Winston Churchill alongside its frequently profane descriptions of street-level gang life. “Just read the book. You know I didn’t write that book.”

But Davis’s book is part of a flurry of statements and interviews that, investigators say, taken together amount to an admission he was involved in the murder.

Davis said in the 2018 documentary “Death Row Chronicles” on BET the shots came from the back of his vehicle. In a later interview with YouTube content creator DJ Vlad, Davis said he had a “sense of remorse” for what happened.

Prosecutors say Davis gave information to investigators in a pair of recorded interviews lawyers call a “proffer.” Suspects share what they know privately, usually to see whether a deal can be worked out for a lesser charge or lighter sentence. If there’s no deal, prosecutors usually can’t use the information against them.

But after Davis’ arrest, Clark County Judge Carli Kierny ruled the proffer interviews are admissible in Keffe D’s trial because Davis made many of the same statements in his book and media blitz that he had previously told police.

“Ultimately, he just talked himself right into jail,” retired Las Vegas Metropolitan Police investigator Greg Kading told CNN’s Jake Tapper in 2023.

In his book, Keffe D acknowledged speaking to police and breaking the gangsta’s code in the process.

“The Feds had followed me around for fifteen years it was finally time to get the sh*t off my chest and over with,” the book said. “Everybody else from my neighborhood was getting off on the sh*t; why not get off on my sh*t? I sang because they promised I would not be prosecuted.”

Who fired the shots?

Davis’s book is vague on who made the call to gun down Tupac, saying it was only coincidental his crew caught up to his vehicle on the street that night, but he is clear the shooting was about revenge for the assault on his nephew.

“I stand firm on the point that Tupac, Suge Knight and the rest of those n***as didn’t have any business putting their hands on my beloved nephew, Baby Lane, period,” he wrote. “Them jumping on my nephew gave us the ultimate green light to do something to their asses.”

Suge Knight, who was behind the wheel, was grazed in the head by a bullet and bleeding profusely as he continued driving, police said.

Although gang ties to Tupac’s killing had been suspected from the beginning, the search for the killer was long hampered by the refusal of potential eyewitnesses to testify.

“All of the people seem to be looking somewhere else,” Las Vegas police spokesman Phil Roland said shortly after Shakur’s death.

With no gun or other physical evidence tying Davis to the crime, prosecutors are relying on his own words, even though they acknowledge they don’t believe everything he has said.

In particular, Keffe D claims shots came from his vehicle after Knight or Shakur raised their own weapon. Investigators don’t believe it.

“At no point during the investigation of the vehicle were any cartridge cases found inside (Knight’s) car or any weapons,” retired Las Vegas officer Clifford Mogg told the grand jury in Davis’ case.

Davis’ decision to tell all was dramatically different from Shakur’s legendary final words as he was bleeding out near Las Vegas Boulevard.

Asked by Las Vegas police officer Chris Carroll if he could name who shot him, Shakur responded, “F*ck you,” Carroll said years later.

Investigators say they are not certain who shot Tupac – Anderson or DeAndre “Big Dre” Smith, who was sitting next to him in the back seat of the Cadillac. Keffe D, who was in the front passenger seat, willingly put out his own theory.

“Orlando shot Tupac and Suge?” Davis was asked in a 2021 interview.

“He did his thing, yeah,” Davis responded. The indictment against Davis alleges he provided the gun used in the shooting.

Anderson denied any involvement in the shooting, and Keffe D said Tupac was actually his nephew’s favorite rapper.

“He had some good-ass songs, I’m not going to lie,” Davis agreed.

Anderson was killed in a gang shootout in 1998, The Los Angeles Times reported. Keffe D, now a grandfather, is the only occupant of the Cadillac still alive.

The shock of Tupac’s murder ended his dreams, but not the violence

Despite the death of his biggest star and his own close call, Knight appeared to believe nothing would change in the business after Tupac’s murder.

“Not at all,” Knight told Kearse in 1996. “We’re going to do the same thing we’ve been doing and sell records.”

But any sense of returning to normal was threatened less than a year later when The Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down – like Tupac, hit by four bullets – while leaving a party in LA’s Miracle Mile. Rumors flew that it was another act of vengeance in response to Tupac’s death, but an 18-month FBI investigation didn’t turn up proof, and no one has ever been charged.

“It was a very sad time and a time where you weren’t sure if it would continue, certainly not on the level that it was,” Kearse said.

When Kearse asked Shakur in 1994 what he thought he was best known for, he laughed.

“My big mouth!” he said, drawing out the word “big” into multiple syllables. “I got a big mouth. I can’t help it.”

The next year, a more contemplative Shakur told MTV he recognized most people knew him by then as “a survivor” of a shooting and prison time. The murder case now coming to court after so many years is a reminder of what he had hoped to become, his chance cut short.

“I want people to be talking about me like, you know, ‘Remember when he was real bad?’” said Tupac. “Everybody changes. Everybody becomes better people, you know? We all should get that chance.”

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