Murder trial starts in hip-hop star Tupac Shakur case. Experts say prosecutors face challenges in 30-year-old case
Police say the man charged in the murder of rap star Tupac Shakur confessed in his own book. A jury will decide.
Next month will mark 30 years since rap icon Tupac Shakur was gunned down in a drive-by shooting while he was on his way up the Vegas strip to Club 662 in a black BMW where he was scheduled to perform.
Witnesses say a white Cadillac pulled up beside him before midnight on Sept. 7, 1996, and guns blasted away. Hip-hop superstar Shakur, 25, was a passenger in the car. He was shot four times and died at Las Vegas’s University Medical Center six days later.
No one talked to the police. The case went cold for decades.
Now, all these years later, someone has been charged with his death. Legal experts say prosecutors face a major challenge proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt, however, as memories and evidence may have faded over three decades.
Ex-street gang leader Duane “Keefe D” Davis, now 63, is charged in Clark County, Nevada, with a single count of murder with a deadly weapon, in this case, providing the .40-caliber Glock 22 semiautomatic handgun used in the slaying. Under Nevada law, Davis can be charged with murder if he took part in the crime without pulling the trigger.
Davis is accused of leading a group of men to kill as payback for a fight Shakur had with Davis’s nephew earlier in the night. The fight grew out of a long-standing feud between street gangs, police say – the Mob Piru Bloods, tied to Shakur’s label Death Row Records, and the South Side Compton Crips, led by Davis, prosecutors allege.
Davis has pleaded not guilty to the charge and faces life in prison without parole.
But the notion that a cold case might be solved, along with Shakur’s enduring fame, is driving the public fascination with the case, said David Herlihy, a Northeastern University teaching professor at the College of Arts, Media and Design, who is also an entertainment attorney following the case.
“Any cold case is interesting to the public; there’s a whole industry of books and television on it,” said Herlihy. “But this guy was truly famous. He turned a lot of heads and sold a lot of records.”
At the time of his death, Shakur, who also went by the stage names 2Pac and Makaveli, had released a fourth solo album, “All Eyez on Me” that sold 5 million records since its release earlier that year. Over the course of his career, Shakur sold 75 million copies of his albums.
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So many people want to see the trial in person that there’s a lottery for who gets in, as scores line up in front of the Vegas courthouse. The opening arguments could begin as soon as next week.
Prosecutors, including Bin Patel, a Clark County, Nevada, deputy district attorney, assert that they may never prove who pulled the trigger. But they claim Davis implicated himself as the mastermind in a book he wrote in 2019.
The book is “Compton Street Legend: Notorious Keffe D’s Street-Level Account of the LA Gangs, the East Coast-West Coast Feuds, and the Death of 40 Million Dollar Man Tupac Shakur.”
In the introduction, Davis wrote: “I’m one of the only living eyewitnesses to Tupac’s killing.”
Multiple book reviews say the memoir paints Davis as a “shot-caller” for the South Side Compton Crips Davis is identified as the man who acquired the gun and pursued a revenge attack against Shakur as part of the ongoing bicoastal hip hop feuding of the 1990s.
Michael Sanft, Davis’s attorney, argued that the book was fictionalized to make a profit, and that it was unclear which parts — if any — Davis actually wrote, the Associated Press reported.
Herlihy said that the book’s apparent confession, “leaves the defense to say their client isn’t credible, but the prosecution to say he is credible. A reversal of roles.”
“His motive may have been to exaggerate or fabricate for money, but the question is, is it beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.
Northeastern University research professor James Alan Fox, who teaches criminology, said that there is another hurdle for prosecutors – time.
“Witnesses’ memories fade,” Fox said. “Witnesses pass away. Some witnesses move away and can’t be found.”
Media accounts say prosecutors intend to call 35 to 45 witnesses, although the witness list contains many more. The two people police believe shot Tupac died in the interim decades.
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But the public eye never left this case, Herlihy said.
“It’s a fascinating, all-front-page news story of a human tragedy,” he said. “Famous people turn heads.”
