Officials said that a Nevada man was arrested on Friday in connection with the unsolved 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur. The man is thought to be the last live suspect being looked into in the case.
Documents from the Clark County District Court say that on Thursday, a grand jury charged Duane Keith Davis, 60, also known as “Keefy D” or “Keffe D,” with murder. The charge was officially filed late Friday morning.
Davis has said that he was in the car that pulled up next to the rapper’s car when he was shot. Before Friday, though, no one had been charged in the case, which has been in the news, the subject of conspiracy theories, songs, and movies for years.
“This is the indictment we’ve been waiting almost three decades for,” Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said Friday while holding a copy of the indictment. “The right thing will happen.”
Davis has been charged with murder with a dangerous weapon to help the crime group South Side Compton Crips. It wasn’t clear right away if Davis had a lawyer to help him with his criminal case. When asked for information, the public defender’s office in Clark County did not get back to us right away.
The indictment says that Davis got a gun for the attack “to get back at Tupac Amaru Shakur” and Marion “Suge” Knight, who was the head of his record label, Death Row, and a part of a rival group, the Mob Piru, for a long time.
The document doesn’t say Davis pulled the gun, but it does say he was just as responsible for the crime as anyone else. The charge says that Davis and the three other gang members who were with him that night planned to kill Tupac “by acting in concert throughout.”
The paper says that Davis wanted Tupac to be killed by “advising, encouraging, hiring, commanding, inducing, and/or otherwise getting the other to do the crime.” At a news conference on Friday, Lt. Jason Johansson of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said that the man had been arrested. Lt. Johansson said, “Duane Davis was the leader of the group that did this crime, and he made the plan that was carried out.”
Shakur and his group were in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996, the night he was shot, to see Mike Tyson fight Bruce Sheldon in a heavyweight match. Officials say that the rapper and Knight got into a fight with their enemy Anderson inside the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino earlier that night, which led to Anderson’s death.
Officials say that after Anderson was beaten, Davis quickly made plans to get back at Shakur and got the gun that was used to kill him. Shakur, who was 25, and his friends had stopped near the corner of East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane when a Cadillac pulled up next to them and someone opened fire, hitting Shakur. On September 13, he died.
Davis is the only one of the four people thought to have been in the car that attacked Shakur who is known to have lived. “In this case, Duane Davis is the only suspect who is still alive,” Johansson said. “The other three suspects are all dead.”
A long time ago, Davis’s cousin, Orlando Anderson, was thought to be the one who pulled the gun. In 1998, Anderson was killed when he was shot in Los Angeles.