LAS VEGAS (AP) — One of the last living witnesses to the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur has been arrested in the Las Vegas area, a long-awaited breakthrough in a case that has frustrated investigators and fascinated the public -Hop- Icon was shot dead on the Las Vegas Strip 27 years ago.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis was arrested early Friday morning on suspicion of murder, according to two officers with firsthand knowledge of the arrest. They requested anonymity ahead of an expected arraignment later Friday.
It was not immediately clear whether Davis has an attorney who can comment on his behalf. Davis has not responded to multiple phone and text messages from The Associated Press seeking comment or an interview in the more than two months since police executed a search warrant at his wife’s home in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson had.
According to the arrest warrant, police were looking for items “related to the murder of Tupac Shakur.” They collected several computers, a cell phone and hard drive, a Vibe magazine that featured Shakur, several .40-caliber bullets, two “tubs of photos” and a copy of Davis’ memoirs.
Davis has been known to investigators for a long time. In interviews and in his 2019 memoir “Compton Street Legend,” he admitted that he was in the Cadillac from which gunfire erupted during the drive-by shooting on Sept. 7, 1996.
That night, Shakur sat in a BMW driven by Marion “Suge” Knight, founder of Death Row Records, in a convoy of about ten cars. They were waiting at a red light when a white Cadillac pulled up next to them and shots were fired. Shakur was shot multiple times and died a week later at the age of 25.
The rapper’s death came as his fourth solo album, “All Eyez on Me,” remained on the charts with around five million copies sold. Shakur has been nominated for a Grammy Award six times and is still considered one of the most influential and versatile rappers of all time.
In his memoirs, Davis said he sat in the passenger seat of the Cadillac and pushed the gun used in the murder into the back seat, from where he said the shots were fired.
Davis blamed his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, saying he was one of two people in the back seat. Anderson, a known rival of Shakur, was involved in a casino brawl with the rapper shortly before the shooting.
Anderson died two years later. He denied any involvement in Shakur’s death.
Davis revealed in his memoirs that he first broke his silence in 2010 at a closed-door meeting with federal and local authorities. He was 46 at the time and facing life in prison on drug charges when he agreed to talk to them about Tupac’s murder, as well as the fatal shooting six months later of Tupac’s rap rival Biggie Smalls, aka Notorious BIG .
“They offered to let me go because I was running a ‘criminal enterprise’ and numerous suspected murders to find out the truth about the murders of Tupac and Biggie,” he wrote. “They promised that if I helped them, they would destroy the indictment and stop the grand jury.”
At the time, Shakur was in a dispute with rap competitor Biggie Smalls, who was fatally shot in March 1997. At the time, both rappers were in the middle of an East Coast-West Coast rivalry that primarily characterized the hip hop scene in the mid-1990s. 1990s.
Greg Kading, a retired Los Angeles police officer who spent years investigating Shakur’s murder and wrote a book about it, said he was not surprised by Davis’ arrest.
The former Los Angeles police officer said he believes the investigation has gained new momentum in recent years after Davis publicly detailed his role in the murder, including in his 2019 memoir.
“It is these events that have given Las Vegas the ammunition and pressure to move forward,” Kading said. “Prior to Keffe D’s public statements, the cases were not criminal in their current form.”