Nearly three decades after the murder of hip-hop star Tupac Shakur, former gang figure Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis has been found guilty.
On the night of September 7, 1996, Shakur, then 25, was in Las Vegas when he was killed in a drive-by shooting.
He was in the passenger’s seat of a BMW in a convoy of others when, as they waited for a red light, someone in a white Cadillac opened fire on him.
He died a week later from multiple gunshot wounds to the arm, thigh, right lung and chest.
Now Davis, the ex-gang boss of the Los Angeles South Side Compton Crips, has been found guilty by a jury of orchestrating the rapper’s death.
The 63-year-old was found guilty of first-degree murder in a Las Vegas court.
On the night Shakur was shot, he’d been in Las Vegas to celebrate his business partner’s birthday and attend a boxing match at the MGM Grand hotel.
Afterwards, in the lobby, one of his friend’s associates spotted a member of the Southside Compton Crip gang, Orlando Tive ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson and told Shakur he had tried to rob them earlier that year.
The hotel’s surveillance footage then showed an ensuing assault on Anderson.
A few hours later, while driving through the city, a car pulled up to the convoy Shakur was travelling with and shot at the vehicle he was in, striking him four times.
He was rushed to hospital and put on life support, but died of internal bleeding six days later.
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Davis, 63, is a former leader of the LA street gang South Side Compton Crips.
In 2019, he co-authored a memoir titled Compton Street Legend, which claimed that he was inside the Cadillac at the time of the murder and was the person who ‘tossed’ the gun used to kill Shakur after the shooting into the back seat.
He maintained that he was not the person who opened fire.
