Police in the US gambling capital of Las Vegas have arrested the man suspected of having shot and killed Tupac Shakur 27 years ago.
The hip-hop legend was only 25 years old when he was gunned down in September 1996.
He died on September 13, 1996, a week after he was shot four times in his car while waiting at a red light.
The circumstances surrounding his murder remain the subject of ongoing speculation and conspiracy theories.
However, Las Vegas police finally had a breakthrough in Tupac’s murder with the arrest of Duane “Keffe D” Davis early Friday morning September 29, 2023.
The arrest is a long-awaited break for one of the most infamous unsolved murders in hip-hop history.
The 60-year-old suspect was arrested while on a walk near his home in Henderson, a Las Vegas suburb.
Even with Duane Davis’ arrest, the puzzle of Tupac’s murder is far from being solved largely because of the suspect himself.
Davis had been known to authorities as far back as when Tupac was murdered but has only been arrested 27 years after the rapper’s death.
Below are seven puzzling things about the suspect.
1. Witness
Duane Davis had for a long time described himself as one of the last living witnesses in Tupac’s shooting. He claimed that he witnessed the shooting of the rapper and perhaps his testimony was the one that took investigators off the track for nearly three decades.
2. On-site commander
After Davis was arrested on Friday morning, he was present in court where he was charged with one count of murder with a deadly weapon in affiliation with a criminal gang.
The Clark county prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo said that Davis acted as the “on-ground, on-site commander” who “ordered the death” of Tupac Shakur “for the purpose of seeking retribution”.
3. Confession
Davis, whose late nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson was considered a suspect in Tupac Shakur’s murder, has long been known to investigators. He admitted in interviews and his 2019 tell-all memoir ‘Compton Street Legend’ that he was in the front passenger seat of the white Cadillac from which gunfire erupted during the September 1996 shooting.
4. Book
Davis was a leader of the South Side Crips gang and wrote in his book about running a multimillion-dollar nationwide drug empire.
In the book, Davis said he broke his silence over Tupac’s killing in 2010 during a closed-door meeting with federal and local authorities. At the time, he was 46 and facing life in prison on drug charges.
“They promised they would shred the indictment and stop the grand jury if I helped them out,” he wrote.
5. Davis could be identified in 1996
Immediately following Tupac Shakur’s shooting, rapper Yaki Kadafi, who had been in the car directly behind Shakur, told police the assailants were driving a white Cadillac and that he could identify the killer.
Las Vegas police failed to follow up on the lead. Kadafi was shot and killed in an unrelated incident in New York two months later.
6. Implicated someone else
In 2018, after Davis was diagnosed with cancer, he admitted publicly in an interview for a BET show to being inside the Cadillac used in Tupac’s shooting.
He, however, implicated his nephew, Anderson, saying he had been one of two people in the backseat where the shots had been fired.
Davis’s own words reinvigorated the case in 2018, Kevin McMahill, the Las Vegas sheriff, said.
Anderson denied any involvement in the Shakur shooting. He died in 1998 in a shooting in Compton, California.
7. Retired cop
Retired Los Angeles police detective Greg Kading, who spent years investigating the Shakur killing and wrote a book about it, said Davis’s indictment was long overdue.
“It’s never been unsolved in our minds. It’s been unprosecuted,” he recently told the AP following Davis’ arrest.
Kading said he interviewed Davis in 2008 and 2009, during Los Angeles police investigations of the killings of Shakur in Las Vegas and Biggie Smalls in Los Angeles.
The retired cop said he believed the investigation gained new momentum in recent years following Davis’s public descriptions of his role in the killing.
“He put himself squarely in the middle of the conspiracy. He had acquired the gun, he had given the gun to the shooter and he had been present in the vehicle,” Kading said.
Kading noted that Davis is the last living person among the four people who were in the vehicle from which shots were fired at Shakur and Knight. Others were Anderson, Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown and DeAndre “Freaky” Smith.
Related: Bullet cartridges found in house linked to Tupac Shakur’s murder sent for forensic testing
