Who is Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis? The Tupac Shakur murder suspect facing trial after 30 years

For almost three decades, it's been one of music's most haunting unsolved mysteries: who pulled the trigger on Tupac Shakur? Now, a Las Vegas courtroom might finally deliver an answer.

A killing that changed hip-hop forever

When Tupac Shakur was gunned down on September 7, 1996, he was gangsta rap's biggest star, an artist whose death would turn him into a permanent cultural icon. According to the BBC, no one was arrested for his murder for nearly 27 years, until Duane "Keffe D" Davis was unexpectedly charged in 2023.

Now 63, Davis faces trial in Las Vegas on a charge of murder with a deadly weapon, accused of ordering the hit and supplying the gun used to kill Shakur. He has pleaded not guilty. Jury selection began this week, with opening statements set to begin August 17. A conviction would mean life without parole.

The rivalry behind the bullets

Los Angeles in the 1990s was carved up by gang warfare between the Bloods and the Crips, a street-level conflict that bled directly into the music industry through the East Coast–West Coast rap feud, embodied by Suge Knight's Death Row Records on one side and Sean "Diddy" Combs' Bad Boy Records on the other.

Ironically, as the BBC notes, Tupac himself started out as an East Coast artist. Born in New York, he relocated to northern California as a teen and only became associated with the West Coast after signing to Death Row alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. Author Jeff Pearlman, who wrote a biography on Shakur, pointed out that despite his gangsta rap image, Tupac's roots ran deeper, his mother Afeni was a Black Panther, and his music doubled as political expression, according to biographer Santi Elijah Holley, quoted by the BBC.

By the time of his death, Tupac had already broken records with All Eyez on Me, hip-hop's first-ever double album, moving more than five million copies.

The night it happened

The chain of events that led to Tupac's death began at a Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand. Afterward, surveillance cameras caught Tupac and his entourage, reportedly linked to the Mob Piru Bloods, assaulting Orlando Anderson, an alleged Crips member, in the hotel lobby.

Hours later, as Tupac rode in the passenger seat of Suge Knight's BMW, a white Cadillac pulled up beside them and opened fire. Shakur was hit multiple times and died six days later. Anderson was questioned but never charged, and was killed in a separate shooting in 1998, leaving investigators with a case that seemed destined to go cold forever.

How a memoir cracked the case

The break came, strangely enough, through Davis's own words. He gave police information about Tupac's killing back in the 2000s in exchange for immunity, but years later, he started talking publicly anyway. In a 2019 memoir called Compton Street Legend, as quoted by Variety, Davis claimed he was in the Cadillac that night and admitted to passing the gun into the backseat, though he never claimed to have fired it himself.

That book, along with a series of media interviews and a BET docuseries appearance, became the foundation prosecutors used to finally bring charges. Police say Davis's own public statements reignited the long-dormant investigation, prompting a 2023 search of his home that turned up computers, boxes of photographs, and Tupac-related memorabilia.

Prosecutors allege the shooting was retaliation for the MGM Grand beating of Davis's nephew, Anderson, and that Davis orchestrated the killing to benefit his gang. With jury selection now underway, the trial is expected to drag the East Coast–West Coast wars, gang rivalries, and decades of hip-hop lore back into the spotlight, possibly with testimony from figures like Suge Knight himself, long considered the last living witness to Tupac's final moments.