On Sept. 29, a Las Vegas man was arrested following his connection to iconic rapper Tupac Shakur’s death in 1996.
Officials who spoke with the Associated Press said Duane “Keffe D” Davis was taken into custody. He is suspected of being connected to the drive-by shooting that took the life of Tupac nearly three decades ago.
Documents obtained by the Associated Press state that police are searching for items “concerning the murder of Tupac Shakur.”
In his 2019 memoir titled, Compton Street Legend, Davis admitted that he witnessed the murder of Tupac. The now-arrested suspect said he was in the Cadillac from which shots were fired. Tupac, who was just 25 when he was fatally shot, was sitting in a BMW driven by Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight. The BMW had stopped at a red light when the shots erupted.
Davis wrote in his book that he was sitting in the front passenger seat of the Cadillac when he passed the weapon to the backseat, where two people were sitting. One of those people, according to Davis, was his nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson. Before Anderson died, however, he said he was not involved in the shooting.
Davis, who was facing drug charges and life in prison at age 46 in 2010, said he spoke to officials about what he witnessed when Tupac was murdered. He also said he gave police information about the death of Tupac’s rival, Biggie Smalls, who was fatally shot a mere six months after the “All Eyez on Me” rapper.
“They offered to let me go for running a ‘criminal enterprise’ and numerous alleged murders for the truth about the Tupac and Biggie murders,” Davis wrote in his book. “They promised they would shred the indictment and stop the grand jury if I helped them out.”
Former Los Angeles Police Department detective Greg Kading spoke to the Associated Press following the latest developments in the decades-old case.
“It’s so long overdue,” Kading said. “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.”
The retired officer, who interviewed Davis in 2008 and 2009, said the suspect “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),” he added. “All the other direct conspirators or participants are all dead. Keffe D is the last man standing among the individuals that conspired to kill Tupac.”
