Thirty years after Tupac Shakur was shot on the Las Vegas Strip, the man prosecutors say orchestrated it will spend at least four decades in prison. Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, a former leader of the Southside Compton Crips, was sentenced on Tuesday to 40 years to life. Judge Carli Kierny also gave him 731 days of credit for time already served.
“You don’t get to take a man from his family,” Kierny said. “You don’t get to take his very life, his whole future from him, and just walk away from it. Especially when that man is Tupac Shakur.” She added that the world never forgot his death, and neither did Las Vegas.
The family speaks
Shakur’s sister, Sekyiwa Shakur, spoke before the sentence was handed down. She called her brother a father figure and a caretaker, and said the loss crippled her family emotionally and mentally. She said the grief led to several hospitalizations for depression, suicidal ideation and PTSD, and that both her children were raised in it. It was hard, she told the court, to sit through testimony about how he was hunted. “He’s so much more than street fodder,” she said.
Her stepbrother, Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur, said Tupac never had children and never saw his nieces and nephews grow up. “All Pac got was a death sentence,” he said. Both asked for the maximum penalty. Davis appeared stoic and had already vowed to appeal.
A night in September 1996
On 7 September 1996, thousands came to Las Vegas for the Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon fight at the MGM Grand. Shakur and Davis were both there. Prosecutors said Shakur’s entourage attacked Davis’s nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, in the aftermath of a fight in Los Angeles. Davis and his crew then “went hunting,” a prosecutor told the jury. They found Shakur in the passenger seat of a black BMW near the Strip, where he was riding with Marion “Suge” Knight. Four bullets hit Shakur, and he died six days later, on 13 September, aged 25.
Prosecutors did not argue that Davis pulled the trigger. Davis told police in 2008 that he handed a gun to a passenger in the back seat and that Anderson fired. Anderson was questioned at the time but never arrested. He died in 1998.
How the case was solved
For decades the killing went unsolved. No weapon was recovered, witnesses stayed quiet under the street code, and physical evidence faded. Las Vegas police were also wary of leads from Compton, partly because the head of security for Knight’s label was a former Compton officer.
What finally moved the case was Davis himself. In 2008 he sat down with investigators under a proffer agreement, a deal meant to shield him from charges for what he disclosed. Detectives had come hoping to learn about the death of Christopher Wallace, known as the Notorious B.I.G. Instead Davis volunteered the story of Shakur’s shooting. Years later he went on a media tour and published a 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend. Prosecutors argued the book effectively voided the agreement, and Kierny ruled that both the memoir and the earlier interviews were admissible. Davis was arrested in 2023.
His defense said the details were embellished and that no physical evidence tied him to the killing. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder on 31 August after deliberating for under three hours. Davis had waived his right to be sentenced by the jury. CNN reported that he told police, in the same 2008 interview, that Sean “Diddy” Combs had agreed to pay him to kill Shakur and Knight. Combs, who is in prison on unrelated charges, denied the claim.
Davis is the only person ever charged or convicted in Shakur’s death. His lawyers have said they will appeal.
Sources
- Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis sentenced to 40 years to life over Tupac Shakur’s murder
- Duane Davis sentenced to 40 years to life for the death of Tupac Shakur | CNN
- Man Who Orchestrated Tupac Shakur Murder Sentenced to 40 Years to Life in Prison
