Duane Keith ‘Keffe D’ Davis, Tupac Shakur’s suspected killer, has pleaded not guilty to orchestrating a drive-by shooting that killed the musician in Las Vegas in 1996.
On Thursday, November 2, the former Southern California street gang leader, who was in the vehicle from which shots were fired and the only person ever accused, appeared before Clark County District Judge Tierra Jones.
Special public defenders Robert Arroyo and Charles Cano represented Davis in court.
Davis’ bid to engage defense counsel Ross Goodman was unsuccessful. Goodman stated two weeks ago that prosecutors lack witnesses and critical evidence, such as a gun or car, for the murder occurred 27 years ago.
Davis appeared in dark-blue jail garb and answered a short series of questions before entering his plea on Thursday, telling the judge that he attended ‘a year in college,’ was not under the influence of any drugs, medication, or alcohol, and understood he had been charged with murder.
Davis, 60, was arrested on Sept. 29 outside a residence in suburban Henderson where Las Vegas police had served a search warrant on July 17, reigniting interest in one of hip-hop music’s most enduring mysteries.
Davis remained imprisoned without bond, did not testify before the grand jury that indicted him, and refuses to speak with The Associated Press from behind bars.
According to the indictment, Davis obtained and gave a gun to someone in the back seat of a Cadillac prior to the car-to-car gunfire that killed Shakur and injured rap music entrepreneur Marion ‘Suge’ Knight at a crossroads just off the Las Vegas Strip.
Shakur died a week later. He was 25.
Knight, now 58, is in prison in California, serving a 28-year sentence for the death of a Compton businessman in 2015.
He has not responded to messages through his attorneys seeking comment about Davis´ arrest.
Prosecutors claim that Shakur’s death in Las Vegas was the result of a rivalry between East Coast Bloods gang members and West Coast Crips gang members, including Davis, for dominance in a musical genre known as ‘gangsta rap.’
According to the grand jury, the Las Vegas shooting on September 7, 1996, was payback for a confrontation hours earlier at a Las Vegas Strip casino involving Shakur and Davis’ nephew, Orlando ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson.
Prosecutors told a grand jury that Davis implicated himself in the assassination in repeated interviews and a 2019 tell-all biography about his past as a member of a Compton Crips faction.
Davis has claimed that he procured a.40-caliber handgun and handed it to Anderson, a member of Davis’ gang, in the back seat of a Cadillac, however he has not named Anderson as the shooter.
Anderson, who was 22 at the time, denied any participation in Shakur’s death and died two years later in a shooting in his hometown of Compton. The other rear seat passenger and the Cadillac’s driver were also killed.
Davis wrote in his book that he told authorities what he knew about the murders of Shakur and gang rival Notorious B.I.G, whose legal name is Christopher Wallace, in 2010 in order to protect himself and 48 of his Southside Compton Crips gang associates from prosecution and the possibility of life sentences in prison.
Wallace, popularly known as Biggie Smalls, was shot and assassinated in Los Angeles six months after Shakur’s death in March 1997.