There is a turning point In the most famous cold case in the history of hip hop: 27 years later the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur Las Vegas police arrested a man accused of shooting the singer on September 6, 1996. Tupac died six days later in the hospital as a result of the shots he received. He was 25 years old and at the peak of his success.
Duane Keith “Keefe D” Davis, 60, was arrested while walking near home. One of the prosecutors involved in the case, Marc DiGiacomo, said prosecutors waited “several months” for the judge to issue the arrest warrant. According to DiGiacomo, Davis was the “bassist” present at the scene of the shooting and also the one who did it “ordered the death” of Shakur.
The September 6, 1996 Tupac – born Lesane Parish Crooks in 1971 but renamed the following year after Peruvian revolutionary Túpac Amaru II – was in Las Vegas to watch a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon. At around 11 p.m., the group accompanying him got into about ten cars with the intention of reaching a nightclub. The singer was aboard a black BMW driven by Marion “Suge” Knight, owner of Death Row Records, the Los Angeles record label and reference point for West Coast hip-hop in the feud with the East Coast at the time. While they were stopped at a traffic light, a white Cadillac pulled up next to the car Tupac was riding in and someone inside started shooting, hitting him with four bullets. Davis is the only living witness to the events. He himself admitted in his 2019 memoir “Compton Street Legend” that he was in the Cadillac, effectively reopening the case. Davis said he was sitting in the front seat and put a gun in the back seat, which is where the shots came from. There sat his nephew Orlando Anderson, Shakur’s well-known rival, with whom he had previously argued in a casino. Anderson was later killed in 1998 and, until yesterday, no one had ever been arrested for Tupac’s murder. According to DiGiacomo, it was Davis who came up with the idea of revenge after the fight. The judge denied the arrestee bail. “It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied,” said District Attorney Steve Wolfson. “In this case, justice has been delayed, but it will not be denied.”
Before his tragic death, Tupac Shakur had already been involved in other collisions. In October 1993, he shot and killed two off-duty police officers who were harassing a black man on the street. The charges were later dropped when it was discovered that the two men were drunk, high on drugs and in possession of illegal weapons. However, on the night of November 30, 1994, the rapper was the victim of an ambush: some men shot him five times during an offensive attack attempted robbery of the Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan. Tupac survived the bullets and left the hospital where he was admitted within 24 hours, against doctors’ advice. The attack occurred shortly before the verdict was announced in court on allegations of sexual assault stemming from events in 1993: the rapper left the hospital in a wheelchair to attend the verdict. In February 1995, Tupac was sentenced by the New York Court of Appeals to four and a half years in prison for abusing a fan. He was released in October of the same year after manager Suge Knight paid a transfer fee Superbail of $1.4 million.