Newly released police body camera video shows officers arresting Duane “Keffe D” Davis for the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur off the Las Vegas strip.
Davis, 60, was walking near his home in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson on 29 September when Las Vegas metropolitan police department officers approached at dawn and called out to him as he was on the other side of the street.
“Hey Keffe, metro police. Come over here,” the officer said.
Davis, holding a water bottle, cooperated and was handcuffed. Comments between Davis and the officers mostly focused on his request for water.
While being driven on a freeway, Davis does not appear in the video but is heard asking an officer if he was followed the previous night. The officer said no. Davis asked: “So why you all didn’t bring the media?” The officer asked why they would bring media and Davis replied: “That’s what you all do.”
The footage suggests he knew why he was being arrested. While parked and with neither Davis nor officers visible on camera, someone out of the frame asked, “So what they got you for, man?”
“Biggest case in Las Vegas history,” Davis replied. After being asked if it was recent, he added, “September 7, 1996,” which is the night Shakur, then 25, was fatally shot.
Police and prosecutors say Davis orchestrated the killing of the hip-hop icon and provided his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, with the gun to do it. Anderson, who denied involvement in Shakur’s killing, died in 1998.
Davis had been a long-known suspect in the case, and publicly admitted his connections to the killing in interviews ahead of his 2019 tell-all memoir, Compton Street Legend.
In mid-July, Las Vegas police raided Davis’s home, drawing renewed attention to one of hip-hop music’s most enduring mysteries.
Davis’s first court appearance this week was cut short when he asked the judge for a postponement while he retains counsel. He’s due in court again on 19 October.
Davis’s decision in recent years to speak out about his actions and motives in the events leading to Shakur’s killing reinvigorated the investigation and paved the way for his indictment for murder, officials said.
In court last week, Clark county prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo said Davis had revealed his “involvement in this crime” on television, an apparent reference to a 2018 BET documentary in which Davis said he knew who killed Shakur. DiGiacomo noted that in his autobiography, Davis called himself the “shot-caller” of the South Side Compton Crips gang and also recounted sitting in the front seat of the car that drove by Shakur.
In the book, Davis described his anger that day learning that Shakur and the Death Row records crew had apparently jumped his nephew: “We couldn’t let no record company studio gangsters do us like that. Had they lost their fuckin’ rappin’ ass minds? … [Marion “Suge” Knight] and his boys committed the ultimate disrespect when they kicked and beat down my nephew Baby Lane in a video seen around the world!” He said he had planned to “confront Suge” and ask: “Why the fuck y’all jump on my nephew?”
Davis, who is the last living person among the four people who were in the vehicle, also acknowledged in the book that he’d tossed a Glock in the back seat of the car before the drive-by shooting.
In an interview earlier this year, Davis was asked if he was worried that he could be jailed or face a life sentence for the Shakur’s murder. “If they want to put me in jail, that’s just something I gotta do. It’s not like I’m scared of jail or nothing,” he responded.
