CNN –
Back in 1998, Duane Keith Davis told a cable channel that he was a passenger in a car from which a fellow passenger fired the shots that killed Tupac Shakur.
In 2009, Davis, known as “Keffe D,” admitted to police a role in the case, a former detective investigating the shooting told CNN, but authorities were not immediately able to use the information.
And after the investigation was revived, according to police, Davis, 60, was arrested Friday in Las Vegas and indicted by a grand jury on a charge of murder with the use of a deadly weapon. The arrest comes some 27 years after the rapper was shot while leaving a boxing match on the Las Vegas Strip.
The shooting on September 7, 1996 was a retaliatory attack on the 25-year-old star, police said Friday. Authorities allege Davis planned and staged the shooting within hours of the rapper and others attacking Davis’ nephew the same day.
Police say Davis is the only suspect in the case who is still alive. Davis said in his memoirs that he was one of two living witnesses – the other being a record label executive who drove Shakur.
“Over the past five years, we have conducted countless interviews and confirmed numerous facts that not only matched the crime scene on the night of the incident, but also confirmed and consistent with the sequence of events that night,” Jason Johansson said a lieutenant with the Las Vegas Police Department’s Homicide Unit during a news conference Friday.
Here’s what we know about Davis, what led to the shooting and his indictment and arrest.
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department
Duane Keith “Keffe D” Davis has been charged in connection with the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur.
Shakur’s shooting stems from a conflict between two gangs based in Compton, California, police said Friday.
Shakur and Marion “Suge” Knight, then CEO of the rapper’s Death Row Records label, were connected to the Mob Piru gang in Compton, Johansson said. Davis is a member of the Southside Compton Crips, he added.
Shakur was in Las Vegas to attend a Mike Tyson boxing match at the MGM Grand Hotel – an event also attended by Davis and his nephew Orlando Anderson.
After the match, members of Death Row Records saw Anderson near the elevator in the hotel, approached him and began kicking and punching him, Johansson said Friday during the news conference where he showed hotel surveillance footage of the altercation. Among the men who attacked Anderson were Shakur and Knight.
Both crews left the hotel after the fight, and Shakur and his group headed to a post-fight party at a nightclub.
When Davis learned of the attack on his nephew, “Davis began devising a plan to obtain a firearm and retaliate against Suge Knight and Mr. Shakur,” Johansson said.
After securing a gun “from a close associate,” Davis got into a white Cadillac with Terrence Brown, Deandre Smith and Anderson, Johansson said. While sitting in the car, Davis handed the gun “to the passengers in the back seat of the vehicle,” Johansson said.
Eventually, the group located the car Shakur and Knight were in, drove alongside their black BMW, and shots were fired from the Cadillac at the BMW, striking Shakur four times, authorities said. The rapper died six days later.
“Duane Davis was the catalyst for this group of people who committed this crime. He orchestrated the plan to commit this crime,” Johansson said.
Anderson and Smith were both in the back seat of the Cadillac, the indictment against Davis says, but it doesn’t specify who pulled the trigger. Anderson denied involvement in the murder to CNN before he was killed in a gang-related shooting in 1998.
Knight is in prison on manslaughter charges in an unrelated case.
In an interview with BET in 1998, Davis said he was sitting in the front seat of the car from which the shots were fired.
“I’m going to keep it because of the rules of the road,” Davis said when asked who pulled the trigger. “It just came from the back seat, bro.”
Then, more than a decade later, Davis admitted to police that he was involved in the 2009 shooting, said Greg Kading, a former police detective who investigated the case.
But his statement couldn’t be used as evidence because it was made as part of a “proposal agreement,” Kading told CNN on Friday. An offer is an agreement in which a suspect agrees to provide potentially useful information to an investigation, but the statements made generally cannot be used as evidence against the suspect.
Additionally, a memoir written by Davis – a copy of which was seized during a police search of Davis’ wife’s Nevada home in July – describes Davis and Knight as the only two living witnesses to Shakur’s shooting.
During the search of the apartment, police confiscated several tablets, an iPhone and five computers. Authorities also seized USB sticks and hard drives, photos and a copy of a magazine issue about Shakur.
At that time, police were looking for “notes, writings, ledgers and other handwritten or typed documents relating to television shows, documentaries, YouTube episodes, book manuscripts and films about the murder of Tupac Shakur,” according to an affidavit requesting a search warrant .
Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Rapper Tupac Shakur poses for photos backstage after his performance at the Regal Theater in Chicago, Illinois, in March 1994.
The decades-old case gained renewed attention in 2018, particularly as Davis spoke publicly about it and new information emerged, officials said.
“Davis’ own admissions of his involvement in this murder investigation, which he shared with numerous different media outlets,” helped jumpstart the investigation, Johansson said Friday.
Davis took part in a Netflix documentary about Shakur’s murder in 2018 and published his memoirs in 2019.
“He began bragging publicly about his involvement in the murder, and that led to law enforcement in Las Vegas re-examining his claims, and ultimately he talked his way straight to prison,” said Kading, the former investigator, told CNN.
“This was probably the last time we tried to successfully solve this case and bring criminal charges,” Johansson said.