After 27 long years, authorities have finally detained a man they believe was involved in the 1996 murder of superstar rapper Tupac Shakur. Today (September 29), the Associated Press reported that Las Vegas Metropolitan Police arrested Duane “Keefe D” Davis on Friday morning, though “the exact charge or charges were not immediately clear.”
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Soon after this, though, a Nevada grand jury charged Davis with one count of murder with a deadly weapon. According to the AP, Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo called Davis the “on-ground, on-site commander” in charge of the hit on Shakur.
“It has often been said that justice delayed is justice denied,” Clark County district attorney Steve Wolfson told AP in a statement Friday. “In this case, justice has been delayed, but justice won’t be denied.”
Davis’ arrest comes a little over two months after LVMPD conducted a search in his home in Henderson, Nevada, just about 20 miles outside Vegas. In August, they reported their findings and what they confiscated from the house, which involved belongings they believed “could tie Davis to the murder.” These included multiple cell phones, four laptops, four tablets, various other electronics, two black tubs full of photographs, an issue of Vibe magazine with a Tupac feature, bullets, and a copy of Davis’ memoir Compton Street Legend (2019).
Per AP, they had reached out to Davis multiple times for an interview to discuss the raid, but he never agreed.
In the aforementioned memoir, Davis wrote about his meeting with authorities in 2010 when he was facing serious drug charges. In this meeting, he shared information he knew about the killing in exchange for the authorities “shredding the indictment and stopping the grand jury” from pursuing his drug charges. Additionally, in his book, Davis gave a detailed account from his perspective of the night Tupac died.
A year before publishing Compton Street Legend, Davis also participated in an interview with BET’s limited series The Death Row Chronicles (2018), where he admitted that he was riding in the white Cadillac driven next to the car Tupac was in the night of his death. According to police, shots fired from the Cadillac penetrated Pac’s car, driven by his friend Suge Knight who ran the label Pac was signed to, Death Row Records. However, when speaking to BET, Davis refused to single out the person who pulled the trigger of the gun.
“Going to keep it for the code of the streets,” he said. “It just came from the backseat, bro.”
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Along with their report, AP touched on a recent interview they conducted with a man named Greg Kading, who was an LAPD detective in the 2000s who investigated the Tupac case. Kading has been insistent for years that Davis bore responsibility for the rapper’s death.
“It’s so long overdue,” Kading told AP. “People have been yearning for him to be arrested for a long time. It’s never been unsolved in our minds. It’s been unprosecuted.”
According to an interview Kading did with VICE‘s Noisey in 2019, Davis’ nephew Orlando Anderson sat in the backseat of the Cadillac with Davis and was the one who allegedly shot Tupac. However, Anderson and the other two men in the car alongside Davis have all passed away, and hence cannot be prosecuted.
Still, though, Kading noted Davis’ willingness over the years to reveal information about that night of his own volition. Essentially, he believes this arrest should have happened sooner.
“It’s those events that have given Las Vegas the ammunition and the leverage to move forward,” he said. “Prior to Keefe D’s public declarations, the cases were unprosecutable as they stood… He put himself squarely in the middle of the conspiracy. He had acquired the gun, he had given the gun to the shooter and he had been present in the vehicle when they hunted down and located both Tupac and Suge (Knight).”
This story has been updated to reflect an update provided by The Associated Press. A previous version of the story ran before the Nevada grand jury handed down the murder charge.
Photo By Raymond Boyd/Getty Images
