Online ReporterLAS VEGAS. – It’s been three decades filled with mystery, conspiracies – and anger.
The drive-by shooting that killed rap superstar Tupac Shakur on 7 September 1996 changed the trajectory of hip-hop and elevated the rapper from the face of the genre to a cultural icon.
His killing became one of popular culture’s great mysteries, with countless theories but no arrests until 2023, when Duane “Keffe D” Davis was unexpectedly charged with murdering the famous rapper.
Davis, a 63-year-old former gang boss, is standing trial in Las Vegas.
He’s accused of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang. He’s pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole.
In the opening day of Tupac Shakur’s murder trial, prosecutors painted former gang leader Duane “Keffe D” Davis as someone seeking revenge before masterminding the drive-by shooting that killed the iconic rapper.
Witnesses took a Las Vegas jury back in time three decades ago to the night Shakur was shot, when gangs had a hold over ‘90s hip-hop and distrust in police led to a lack of cooperation – and one of the most famous cold cases of the last century.
Davis, 63, is charged with Shakur’s murder.
Prosecutors allege that although Davis did not fire the gun that killed the influential rapper, he allegedly orchestrated the killing.
Davis has denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty.
In opening arguments, the prosecution portrayed Davis as the ringleader of the group responsible for the shooting – and point to a memoir he co-authored where he wrote in detail about the night of the shooting.
“Let’s be clear, Duane Davis did not pull the trigger. But he did plan the shooting in retaliation of the beating of his nephew,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told the jury. “Remarkably, you will learn that from Duane Davis himself.”
Davis’ attorneys called the narrative “fiction”, dubbing the case a product of a flawed-decades-long investigation. Davis has distanced himself from the memoir, saying he didn’t write all of it and parts were fictionalised to sell more copies.
Davis, wearing a navy suit and blue tie, sat with his defence team as they questioned why no one had been arrested for nearly three decades and asked why “no one corroborates any of this”.
“What facts do they have after 30 years?” his attorney Michael Sanft questioned.
The prosecution’s first witness was Garry Dale, who was working for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department at the time of the shooting in September 1996.
The officer detailed riding in an ambulance with Shakur after he’d been shot.
He said the rapper refused to offer any information on what happened and who had shot him.
“We’ll take care of it,” Shakur said, according to the officer’s testimony.
At the core of the case is East Coast vs West Coast rap rivalries and turf wars between the Bloods and the Crips street gangs that were immortalised in rap lyrics and news reports in the 1990s.
Police have long said a lack of cooperation in the case led to dead ends in their investigation.
Members of the rapper’s entourage, though, have accused authorities of initially treating them like suspects and failing to follow important leads.
Throughout the day on Monday, prosecutors painted that picture for the jury, explaining that there were no formal criminal charges in the shooting because in the world of guns and gangs “silence means survival”.
But “one person” who had a hard time staying silent was the defendant, prosecutors said, noting that Davis gave a “number” of statements on the case between 1998 and 2003.
Opening statements began on Monday after a week of jury selection.
The trial is likely to unravel the intricacies of the bitter and deadly East Coast vs West Coast rap rivalries and turf wars between the Bloods and the Crips street gangs that were immortalised in rap lyrics and news reports in the 1990s.
It could also include several celebrity witnesses – including Suge Knight, the former CEO of Death Row Records, who has been thought of as the last surviving witness to Shakur’s death.
But the complicated case hinges almost exclusively on one key piece of evidence: a book co-authored by Davis that he has argued is partially a piece of fiction.
Here’s what you should know about the trial and the bitter rivalry tied to the rapper’s death.
To understand how the case became so mythologised, you have to go back to rivalries that grew larger than the men at its centre.
In the Los Angeles gang landscape of the 1990s, there was a vicious turf war between the Bloods, often represented by the colour red, and Crips, who often wore blue.
But that territorial dispute spread through the airwaves as part of a bigger national rivalry – East Coast v West Coast rap.
The genre dispute was represented by two rival record companies that defined 1990s hip-hop: Knight’s Death Row Records and Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Bad Boy Records.
“The funny thing about it is Tupac is actually an East Coast rapper,” said Jeff Pearlman, author of Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur.
Born in New York City, Tupac moved to northern California as a teenager.
He became known as a southern California rapper after signing with Death Row Records, which included acts like Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre.
Santi Elijah Holley, author of An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created, says the Death Row persona never told the whole story.
Tupac’s mother Afeni was a Black Panther and he grew up around the black liberation movement. Holley says his music became his politics: “His activism was his art, his lyrics.”
He acted in a number of Hollywood movies, and released hip-hop’s first double album, All Eyez on Me, which sold over 5,000,000 copies.
That album, which debuted months before his death, cemented his place in the cannon of gangsta rap, a genre that celebrated the violent life of street criminals and drug dealers.
After he was shot in Las Vegas on 7 September 1996, he became immortalised as a kind of martyr for the lifestyle he helped make famous. – BBC
