CNN –
A grand jury has indicted Duane Keith “Keffe D” Davis on a charge of murder with use of a deadly weapon in connection with the 1996 killing of rapper Tupac Shakur, Las Vegas authorities announced.
Davis, 60, was arrested Friday morning in Las Vegas, authorities said. His wife’s home in Henderson was searched in July as part of the ongoing investigation into the shooting.
Shakur was shot while leaving a boxing match on the Las Vegas Strip. His untimely death – the rapper was just 25 years old – was the subject of conspiracy theories and a decades-long investigation.
At a news conference Friday, authorities portrayed Davis as the ringmaster of a plot to kill Shakur in retaliation for an attack on his nephew. Davis has been at the scene for a long time and said he was sitting in the front seat of the white Cadillac that was driving next to Shakur’s car when shots were fired from the back seat, killing the musician. The rapper was shot four times and died six days later.
“For 27 years, Tupac Shakur’s family has waited for justice,” Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said at the press conference.
“The investigation began on the night of September 7, 1996,” McMahill said. “It’s far from over. It has taken the men and women of our Homicide Division countless hours, even decades, of work to get to where we are today.”
Jason Johansson, the head of the police homicide unit, said the killing was a “retaliatory attack” following a conflict between two gangs based in Compton, California. Shakur and Marion “Suge” Knight, the former CEO of Death Row Records, were connected to the Mob Piru gang in Compton, while Davis was connected to the Southside Compton Crips, according to Johansson.
Shakur was in Las Vegas to see Mike Tyson boxing at the MGM Grand Hotel. Members of the Southside Compton Crips, including Davis and his nephew Orlando Anderson, also attended the event.
“As both groups were leaving the fight, members of Death Row Records spotted Orlando Anderson near an elevator bank at the MGM and at that point they began kicking and punching him near that elevator bank,” Johansson said, showing surveillance footage from the hotel battle. Among the men who attacked Anderson were Shakur and Knight.
“Nobody knew that it was this incident that would ultimately lead to the retaliatory shooting and death of Tupac Shakur,” he said.
Both groups left the hotel and Shakur and his crew headed to a post-fight afterparty at a local nightclub. When he learned of the attack on Anderson, “Davis began hatching a plan to obtain a firearm and retaliate against Suge Knight and Mr. Shakur,” Johansson said.
After purchasing a gun from a “close associate,” Davis got into a white Cadillac with Terrence Brown, Deandre Smith and Anderson.
“At some point while they were sitting in the white Cadillac, Mr. Davis took the gun he had been given and handed it to the passengers in the back seat of the vehicle,” Johansson said. A copy of the indictment says Anderson and Smith were both in the back seat and does not specify which man pulled the trigger.
The group found the black BMW that Shakur and Knight were riding in, began shooting at them through the window and immediately fled the area, authorities said.
“Duane Davis was the catalyst for this group of people who committed this crime. He orchestrated the plan to commit this crime,” Johansson said. All other people connected to the crime are dead, he added, including Anderson, who denied his involvement in the murder to CNN before he was killed in a gang-related shooting in 1998.
Johansson said police have long known the outline of what happened that night but lacked sufficient evidence to move the case forward.
According to Johansson, the decades-long effort to officially solve the case was “reinvigorated” in 2018. Davis’ own admissions to the crime were a crucial part of the investigation, he said.
When police searched Davis’ wife’s home in July, they confiscated a copy of a memoir written by Davis detailing street gang life and Shakur’s murder. In the memoir, Davis describes himself as one of only two living witnesses to Shakur’s shooting, the other being Knight, now in prison for manslaughter in an unrelated case.
“I’m going to keep it because of the rules of the road,” Davis said when asked which of the four men in the car was responsible for pulling the trigger. “It just came from the back seat, bro.”
According to a former police officer who investigated the case, Davis confessed to the crime to police in 2009, but the information could not be used.
“We interviewed him in 2009 and he, along with other co-conspirators, confessed to his role in the murder,” Greg Kading told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Friday.
However, “Davis had a proffer agreement, so we couldn’t use the information he provided against him,” Kading said.
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.
Johansson said officials knew that the 2018 rebranding of the case was “probably our last time attempting to successfully solve this case and bring criminal charges.”
Tupac’s stepbrother Mopreme Shakur, who is also a rapper, said the news of Davis’ arrest was “bittersweet.”
“We have been through decades of pain. They knew about this guy who was giving his opinion for years,” he said.
“So why now?” he said. “It’s not over for us yet. We want to know why and whether there were accomplices.”
Shakur’s career was short but extremely influential and the musician left an outsized legacy in music, style and culture.
Tupac Amaru Shakur was born on June 16, 1971 in Harlem, New York. He and his sister were raised by a single mother, former Black Panther member Afeni Shakur, until the trio moved to Baltimore, where Shakur enrolled at the Baltimore School for the Arts. The family soon moved back to Marin City, California. Although Shakur moved around a lot in his youth, he considered nearby Oakland his home.
“I give Oakland all my love. When I stake a claim somewhere, I claim Oakland, even if I don’t live there,” Shakur said in a 1993 interview.
Knight, co-founder and then-CEO of Death Row Records, visited Shakur in 1995 while he was serving a prison sentence in New York and offered to pay his bail on the condition that he sign with his label. Shakur agreed and signed with Death Row Records, joining a roster of artists that also included Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre belonged.
The rapper released eleven platinum albums: four during his five-year career and seven more posthumously. His first album, “2Pacalypse Now,” was released in November 1991. He was also a poet and appeared in films such as “Poetic Justice” and “Above the Rim.”
He used his music to comment on social issues, with his introspective lyrics often covering topics such as racial inequality, poverty and gang violence.
His career was also marked by a high-profile rivalry with East Coast rapper Biggie Smalls. The hip-hop legend, who enjoyed a similarly meteoric rise to fame, was shot dead in Los Angeles at the age of 24, less than a year after Shakur’s death. His murder is still unsolved.