Las Vegas police arrested a suspect on Friday in the 1996 murder case of rapper Tupac Shakur.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis was charged with first-degree murder and indicted by a Nevada grand jury. While Davis was not the actual shooter, in Nevada you can be charged with murder if you help someone commit the crime.
If convicted, the jury also voted to tack on an additional 20 years to the sentence for gang activity.
Davis himself had publicly admitted to being in the car during the drive-by shooting and providing the gun, via a 2018 video confession and his 2019 memoir. He implicated his late nephew Orlando Anderson as the shooter. In July of this year, Las Vegas police served a search warrant at his Henderson home as part of the case, seizing laptops, hard drives and a copy of the memoir.
Shakur had previously gotten into a scuffle with Anderson in a casino, and just prior to the shooting, Shakur and Marion “Suge” Knight were involved in a hotel lobby fight with Davis and Anderson.
That night, Shakur was in a BMW driven by Knight when a white Cadillac pulled up beside them at a red light, and Shakur was shot several times. He died a week later in the ICU at the age of 25.
The shooting was the peak of the escalating “West Coast/East Coast” rivalry between Shakur and Knight’s Death Row Records and Biggie Smalls’ Bad Boy Records, which Davis reportedly had ties to.
“This is no doubt a pivotal moment. The silence of the past 27 years surrounding this case has spoken loudly in our community,” Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur, the rapper’s sister, said in a Friday statement. “It’s important to me that the world, the country, the justice system, and our people acknowledge the gravity of the passing of this man, my brother, my mother’s son, my father’s son.”
