A guy was charged with killing Tupac Shakur on Friday, 25 years after he was shot dead in a gang fight in Las Vegas. This crime came to represent the violence of gangsta rap as it gained popularity.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 60, had long acknowledged his involvement in the slaying, boasting he was the “on-site commander” in the effort to kill Shakur and Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight in revenge for his nephew’s assault.
Davis’ early morning arrest Friday followed 27 years of investigations by police, who had been frustrated by an apparent lack of useable evidence, and came two months after they raided his home in Henderson, just outside Las Vegas.
“The presumption is great that he is responsible for the murder of Tupac Shakur, and he will be found guilty of murder with use of a deadly weapon,” prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo told a court in Nevada.
Shakur, the best-selling hip-hop artist behind hits such as “California Love,” “Changes,” and “Dear Mama,” was already a huge star in the world of rap when he was gunned down in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996. He was just 25.
He was signed to Death Row Records, a label that was once connected to the Southside Compton Crips rival street gang Mob Piru in Los Angeles.
Shakur and co-founder of Death Row Records Knight were in Las Vegas on the day of the murder, according to DiGiacomo, to watch Mike Tyson fight.
They attacked Orlando Anderson, a member of the Crips, Davis’ nephew, in the foyer of a hotel elevator.
“(Davis) formulated a plan to exact revenge upon Mr Knight and Mr Shakur” for this beating, DiGiacomo said.
“He acquired a 40-caliber Glock firearm from a drug associate.
“He gets into (a light-colored) Cadillac and he provides the 40-caliber Glock firearm to one of the two individuals in the back seat,” and the group set off to find their intended victims.
The two rap moguls were spotted in a car on a Las Vegas street.
“They pulled up next to the vehicle and the rear passenger fired a number of rounds out of that vehicle striking Mr Knight in the head and Mr Shakur several times,” DiGiacomo said.
Shakur died in a hospital several days later. Knight survived.Investigators had a good understanding of what happened that night, according to the prosecutor, but they had not accumulated enough acceptable evidence to build a strong case.
When Davis, supposedly the only person in the car that night still alive, published an autobiography and discussed the crime for a TV show, things started to shift.
