Nearly 30 years after Tupac Shakur was fatally shot on the Las Vegas Strip, a Nevada jury has found an ex-Compton gang leader guilty of first-degree murder.
Immediately after the verdict was read out, Duane “Keff D” Davis told the court, “I would like to appeal this matter.” Davis will continue to be held in custody, with his sentencing set for October 13. Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny could hand Davis life in prison.
Now 63, Davis was arrested in Vegas in late 2023 in conjunction with Tupac’s 1996 death and has remained behind bars since. He had entered a not guilty plea to the charge of one count of murder with use of a deadly weapon.
Jurors spent less than three hours deliberating Monday before returning with their verdict. Earlier in the day, the panel heard closing arguments from both sides in the three-week trial.
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In many ways, the brevity of the jury’s deliberations should be no surprise.
Davis has admitted in interviews and in his 2019 memoir Compton Street Legend that he was in the Cadillac from which the gunfire erupted in the drive-by shooting.
Tupac Shakur was 25 and at the top of his game and career as both a musician and an actor when he was gunned down in Sin City. The Poetic Justice star and “California Love” chart topper was struck by two rounds in the chest, one in the arm and one in the thigh while sitting in a vehicle on the night of the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon fight at the MGM Grand. The son of a Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur died at in the hospital six days later.
In the decades since Shakur’s death, his legacy has grown into one of the defining icons of hip-hop. Correspondingly, with the seemingly connected L.A. shooting death of the Notorious B.I.G (aka Christopher Wallace) in March 1997, his long unsolved killing became the focus of various theories. Some drew in the likes of Sean “Diddy” Combs and Death Row Records boss Suge Knight as settling their East Coast/West Coast beef over the bodies of their most successful acts. Others took in law enforcement and an effort to kill off a new generation of Black leaders.
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Whatever really went down that night, questions surrounding the case have been the subject of numerous film and TV documentaries and dramas.
As various record labels have profited off 2Pac remixes, reisssues, rare tracks and unreleased songs over the years, the likes of USA Network’s 2018 series Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and Biggie Smalls, the 2017 doc Who Shot Biggie and Tupac?, the 2017 biopic All Eyez on Me from Summit, Morgan Creek, Program Pictures and Codeblack Films have come out on the small and big screens. Probing into the death and life of Shakur, there was also Nick Broomfield’s 2002 feature-length documentary Biggie & Tupac, FX’s Emmy-nominated series Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur, which premiered in 2023, and the Oscar-nominated 2003 film Tupac: Resurrection.
