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Tupac Shakur Murder Trial Opens With Keffe D’s Own Admitted Involvement on Display
Keffe D’s Tupac murder trial begins with prosecutors playing interviews where he admits involvement, while his lawyer calls him a liar.
The long-running mystery around Tupac Shakur’s killing has finally moved into a courtroom, and on Monday, Aug. 17, prosecutors opened with something they say has been sitting in plain sight for years: multiple interviews in which Duane “Keffe D” Davis appears to place himself inside the story.
In what remains hip-hop’s most notorious unsolved murder case, prosecutor Binu Palal told jurors the evidence would show Keffe D’s guilt, including his own words. To make that point, Palal played several recorded interviews Davis gave to investigators and media outlets, in which he says he was there and handed the gun to the person who fired the shots that killed Tupac in a drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas Strip in September 1996.
Defense attorney Michael Sanft answered with a different version of the same man: a storyteller, a liar, and someone whose claims were never backed by charges for nearly three decades. Sanft put up a slide bearing the word “bullsh*t” and told the jury that “Keffe was known to do this.” He argued that for the 27 years since Tupac’s death, Davis “was never charged for any of what he said during that time period, and it’s because they knew he was full of crap,” Sanft said. “Otherwise they would’ve.”
Sanft urged jurors to focus on the evidence rather than the mythology that has built up around the case. He also insisted prosecutors cannot even prove Davis was in Las Vegas the night Tupac was shot.
Investigators, however, say Davis supplied the gun used in the killing. Their theory is that the shooting was revenge for a beating Tupac and members of Death Row Records allegedly gave Davis’s nephew, Orlando Anderson, at the MGM Grand Casino just hours earlier.
The first day also brought testimony from eyewitness Ingrid Stokes and former Las Vegas police officer Garry Dale, who stopped Suge Knight and Tupac earlier that night for driving without a license plate.
Davis, now 63, is charged with one count of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang in Tupac’s death. If convicted, he faces life in prison. The trial is expected to last up to six weeks.
ABC News / Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
