A jury found 63-year-old Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty in the murder of rap icon Tupac Shakur roughly 30 years after the tragic killing.
Shakur was gunned down on the night of September 7, 1996, while sitting in a black BMW with Death Row Records head Marion “Suge” Knight. The two were reportedly waiting at a red light near the Las Vegas Strip when assailants in a white Cadillac pulled up alongside them and opened fire. Shakur died from his gunshot wounds six days later in the hospital.
The jury found Davis guilty after deliberating for “less than three hours,” according to ABC News, unanimously convicting for “murder with the use of a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang.”
Prosecutors say Davis did not fire the gun that killed Shakur in a drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas Strip on Sept. 7, 1996 — they allege that was the work of either Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, Davis’ nephew, or another man in the backseat of the car.
Police and prosecutors have accused Davis, an admitted longtime leader of a Los Angeles street gang, of being the “shot caller” and handing the gunman the murder weapon.
The other three men who allegedly participated in the shooting have all since died. According to the Associated Press, prosecutors presented mounds of evidence linking Davis to the crime, including his own confessions in his memoirs and on tape.
Davis co-authored “Compton Street Legend,” a book about the shooting and Davis’ time in the Crips gang.
His attorneys unsuccessfully fought to block the book’s use at trial. They argued it was fictionalized, and that because it had a co-author, it’s impossible to know which portions Davis wrote.
The memoir says Shakur and his entourage “crossed the line” when they beat up Davis’ nephew at a Las Vegas casino. Prosecutors have alleged Davis’ anger over the beating is part of what motivated the shooting. However, they have decided to focus more on Davis’ documentary and police interviews rather than his book.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors that even Davis did not pull the trigger in the murder of Tupac Shakur, he did “plan the shooting in retaliation of the beating of his nephew.”
In a 2008 interview with the FBI during an investigation into the killing of rapper Notorious B.I.G., Tupac’s chief rival, Davis said on tape that he remembered handing a gun to the men in the backseat of a white Cadillac before the drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur and wounded Marion “Suge” Knight.
Davis faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. He is the only individual tried and convicted for the murder of Tupac.