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A former Southern California street gang leader pleaded not guilty to murder in the 1996 killing of rap music icon Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas — a charge prompted by his own descriptions in recent years about orchestrating the deadly drive-by shooting.
Duane Keith “Keffe D” Davis is the only person still alive who was in the vehicle from which shots were fired and the only person ever charged with a crime in the case.
In court on Thursday, Davis stood in shackles as he awaited proceedings and waved to his wife, son and daughter in the packed spectator gallery.
“Not guilty,” Davis said when Clark County District Court Judge Tierra Jones asked for his plea.
The judge told Davis that prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty in the case, which could put Davis in prison for the rest of his life if he is convicted.
In court, Davis wore dark-blue jail garb and answered several questions, telling the judge that he attended “a year in college,” wasn’t under the influence of drugs, medication or alcohol, and he understood he is charged with murder. The judge set his next court date for Tuesday to schedule the trial.
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Davis, 60, is originally from Compton, California. He was arrested September 29 outside a home in suburban Henderson where Las Vegas police served a search warrant July 17, drawing renewed attention to one of hip-hop music’s most enduring mysteries.
Davis remains jailed without bail and did not testify before the grand jury that indicted him.
The indictment alleges Davis obtained and provided a gun to someone in the back seat of a Cadillac before the car-to-car gunfire that mortally wounded Shakur and wounded rap music mogul Marion “Suge” Knight at an intersection 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 allege that Shakur’s killing in Las Vegas came out of competition between East Coast members of a Bloods gang sect and West Coast groups of a Crips sect, including Davis, for dominance in a musical genre dubbed “gangsta rap.”
The grand jury was told the September 7, 1996 shooting in Las Vegas was retaliation for a brawl 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 killing in multiple interviews and a 2019 tell-all memoir that described his life leading a Crips sect in Compton. Davis has said he obtained a .40-caliber handgun and handed it to Anderson, a member of Davis’ gang, in the back seat of a Cadillac, though he didn’t identify Anderson as the shooter.
Anderson, then 22, denied involvement in Shakur’s killing and died two years later in a shooting in his hometown of Compton. The other back seat passenger and the driver of the Cadillac are also dead.
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