The long-awaited trial over the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur begins Monday in Las Vegas, nearly 30 years after the hip-hop icon was killed in a drive-by shooting.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips, is accused of ordering the killing and providing the gun used in the attack. He faces life in prison without parole if convicted.
Shakur, widely known as 2Pac, was shot on September 7, 1996, while travelling through Las Vegas after attending a Mike Tyson boxing match at the MGM Grand casino. He died six days later at the age of 25.
The trial is expected to last about a month, although prosecutors may not establish who actually fired the shots that killed the rapper.
Tupac Shakur killing linked to hip-hop rivalry
The case is rooted in the bitter East Coast-West Coast rivalry that dominated American hip-hop in the 1990s.
Shakur was signed to Death Row Records, founded by Marion “Suge” Knight, while rival Bad Boy Records was led by Sean “Diddy” Combs and featured rapper Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, who was himself murdered in March 1997.
Prosecutors allege that Death Row was protected by Mob Piru, a Los Angeles gang linked to the Bloods alliance, while Bad Boy Records had hired the rival South Side Compton Crips as bodyguards.
Hours before Shakur was shot, he and Knight reportedly attacked Crips member Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson at the MGM Grand. Anderson was Davis’s nephew.
Prosecutors say the incident triggered Davis’s decision to seek revenge.
Later that night, a white Cadillac carrying Davis, Anderson and others pulled alongside Shakur’s vehicle. Shots were fired from the Cadillac, fatally wounding the rapper.
Davis’s memoir became key evidence
The investigation remained unresolved for decades before Davis’s 2019 memoir revived attention on the case.
In the book, Davis said he was sitting in the front of the Cadillac and had handed a pistol to people in the back seat. However, he did not identify the person who fired the shots.
The other people believed to have been inside the vehicle have since died.
Davis was arrested in September 2023 and has since denied involvement in Shakur’s killing.
“I’m innocent. I ain’t killed nobody. Never did ever kill nobody,” Davis said in a March 2025 interview with ABC News from prison.
“They don’t have no evidence against me. They can’t even put me in Las Vegas.”
Davis now claims he was in Los Angeles on the night Shakur was killed and says he never read his own memoir. He alleges that his co-author exaggerated his account to boost book sales.
“I just gave him details of my life,” Davis said. “And he went and did his little investigation and wrote the book on his own.”
His lawyers unsuccessfully sought to prevent prosecutors from using the memoir as evidence, along with comments Davis made to police in 2008 when he was interviewed as a witness.
Trial unlikely to answer every question
Jury selection is expected to take about a week before the trial gets fully under way.
Whatever the outcome, the proceedings may not resolve every question surrounding Shakur’s death.
In May, the rapper’s stepbrother, Maurice Shakur, filed a wrongful death lawsuit, arguing that people involved in the killing had gone unaccountable for decades.
The lawsuit also refers to the television documentary miniseries Sean Combs: The Reckoning, in which Davis reportedly told police that Combs offered him $1 million to kill Shakur.
The allegations concerning Combs remain part of the wider controversy surrounding the case and are separate from the criminal charge Davis is facing.
The trial represents the most significant legal development in one of America’s most famous unresolved celebrity murders since Shakur was killed nearly three decades ago.
