Rapper gunned down in 1996
A Las Vegas man has been arrested in connection to the fatal drive-by shooting of Tupac Shakur in 1996. Duane “Keefe D” Davis was taken into custody on Sept. 29, citing two officials with firsthand information. The charges were not immediately clear at press time.
In July, Las Vegas police revealed that they had searched Davis’ home in connection with the investigation of Shakur’s murder. Though the police said the warrant was “part of the ongoing Tupac Shakur homicide investigation,” they declined to offer any further details at the time.
According to a warrant obtained by NBC News at the time, authorities searched Davis’ home, specifically looking at desktops and other electronic storage devices, including thumb drives, CDs, external hard drives, and audio recordings. The warrant reportedly uncovered a Pokeball USB drive, a black iPhone, two iPads, and a purple Toshiba laptop, among other items.
The search warrant served in Henderson, Nev. was arguably the biggest development in the unsolved homicide in years. Though numerous investigations, books, and pretty wild conspiracy theories have sprouted up over the years, Las Vegas police appeared to make little public progress in solving the case.
One of the last times the case garnered a public statement from the Las Vegas Police was in 2018 after Davis, a former gang member, claimed on an episode of BET’s “Death Row Chronicles” that he knew who killed Shakur. Davis didn’t reveal any names; he also did not deny that Orlando Anderson–reportedly his late nephew–could have been the killer. He later wrote about it in his 2019 tell-all memoir “Compton Street Legend.” Now, Davis is the suspect arrested.
Tupac Shakur was shot on Sept. 7, 1996, in Las Vegas while en route to a nightclub with Death Row Records co-founder Suge Knight following a Mike Tyson fight. While Knight and Shakur’s car was idling at a stoplight, a white Cadillac pulled up next to their vehicle on the passenger side, and an unidentified gunman fired 14 shots. Shakur was hit four times and died several days later, on Sept. 13, 1996.
While no arrests were ever made, Anderson was identified as an early suspect. He was an alleged Crips gang member with whom Shakur had a run-in earlier that night after the boxing match. Members of the entourage following Knight and Shakur’s car even told police that Anderson fired the shots. Anderson, however, was eventually killed in 1998 in an unrelated gang shooting, and no other leads emerged.
