Jury selection began Monday in the long-awaited murder trial of Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the former South Side Compton Crips leader accused of orchestrating the 1996 killing of rapper Tupac Shakur.
Davis, 63, faces a charge of murder with the use of a deadly weapon. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The trial is expected to last about a month.
Prosecutors allege that Davis ordered the drive-by shooting and supplied the gun used in the attack. Shakur, then 25, was fatally wounded on the night of Sept. 7, 1996, while riding in a car on the Las Vegas Strip after attending a Mike Tyson boxing match at the MGM Grand. He died six days later.
According to the prosecution’s account, the shooting stemmed from a confrontation earlier that evening. After the fight, Shakur and Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight were involved in an assault on Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, Davis’s nephew and a fellow Crips member. Later that night, a white Cadillac carrying Davis, Anderson and others pulled alongside Shakur’s vehicle and opened fire.
The case remained unsolved for decades until Davis’s 2019 memoir revived interest. In the book, he described being in the front seat of the Cadillac and handing a pistol to passengers in the back. He did not identify who fired the shots. All other known occupants of the vehicle have since died. Davis had previously made similar statements to reporters and in a 2008 police interview.
Davis has since recanted. He pleaded not guilty and now maintains he was in Los Angeles the night of the shooting. In a March 2025 interview from jail with ABC News, he said: “I’m innocent. I ain’t killed nobody. Never did ever kill nobody. They don’t have no evidence against me. They can’t even put me in Las Vegas.” He claims his co-author exaggerated details in the memoir to boost sales and that he never read the finished book.
Defense attorneys unsuccessfully sought to exclude the memoir and the 2008 police statements from evidence.
The killing has long been tied to the bitter East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry of the 1990s between Death Row Records, associated with the Mob Piru Bloods, and Bad Boy Records. Shakur, signed to Death Row, was a central figure in that conflict. The Notorious B.I.G., a Bad Boy artist, was murdered in Los Angeles in March 1997; that case also remains unsolved.
Even a verdict in Davis’s trial is unlikely to resolve all questions surrounding Shakur’s death. In May, the rapper’s stepbrother, Maurice Shakur, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, arguing that others involved in the killing have never been held accountable. The suit references a recent documentary in which Davis claimed Sean “Diddy” Combs offered him $1 million to kill Shakur. Combs is currently imprisoned on unrelated charges.
Davis appeared in Clark County District Court on Monday wearing a light-blue shirt and blue tie as jury selection got underway.
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