Yesterday, court found former gang leader Duane Keffe D Davis guilty of first-degree murder of sensational rap legend Tupac Shakur. 30 years after Tupac was killed, the verdict is the first glimpse into one of the America’s cold cases which has, for too long, sparked number of conspiracy theories for the amount of secrecy that has shrouded it.
The jury found him guilty on the charge of ordering the rap superstar’s killing in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas on 7 September 1996.
Duane Keffe D Davis, 63, was the former leader of South Side Compton Crips, a violent street gang. While he was 33 at the time he committed the crime, Tupac was a 25-year-old rap celebrity who sold over 75 million records worldwide.
During the trial, the court played recording of police interview in 2008 when Davis said he was in the car carrying the man who shot the rapper, but that he was not the one who did the shooting. But the prosecutors argued that while Davis didn’t himself pulled the trigger, he called the shot by asking Orlando Anderson, his cousin, to open fire.
Anderson died in an unrelated shooting in 2008, but he had never admitted shooting Tupac. Hours before the rapper was killed, his crew had a confrontation with Anderson at a Las Vegas casino in which they beat the Davis’ nephew. In the world of gangsterism, Davis couldn’t let a thing like that just go without a consequence, the prosecutors argued, and so he provided the weapon and ordered Tupac’s killing.
Ironically, the key evidence in the case were Duane Keffe D Davis’ own words. Apart from admitting to the police that he was in the white Cadillac from where Anderson shot Tupac, he has boasted publicly in other occasions that he was responsible for killing the rapper.
He really gave himself away in his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, where he elaborated on his roles in killing the rapper.
“When you have the shot caller sitting shotgun when shots are fired, there’s no doubt he’s responsible,” prosecutor Binu Palal told jurors.
Davis’ defence tried in vain to talk him out of his own words, arguing he was only saying or writing those things to make money and to sell more copies of his book.
Just before the court emptied out, Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny set Davis’ sentencing for 13 October. Davis is likely to face life imprisonment. He said he would appeal the ruling, but the judge maintained that it would be only after the sentencing.