A Las Vegas jury took less than three hours to reach a verdict in a decades old cold case: the murder of Tupac Shakur. 63-year-old Duane “Keefe D” Davis was found guilty of first-degree murder on August 31, 2026, nearly 30 years to the day after the September 7, 1996, shooting.
While Davis did not shoot Tupac himself, he made repeated public statements over the years saying that he had been inside the car and provided the gun used in the killing. In his not guilty plea, Davis claimed that those statements were exaggerated for financial gain. Prosecutors alleged that as a leader of the Southside Compton Crips, Davis organized the group of four men that shot Tupac in retaliation for the rapper beating Davis’s nephew at a Casino earlier the same day.
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Davis’s nephew Orlando Anderson is generally understood to have been the gunman who actually killed Tupac; he was killed in a gunfight roughly 9 months later. Of the four men in the car that night, Davis is the last surviving member.
Prosecutors declined to comment on the verdict to AP News. The Shakur family said they were awaiting sentencing on October 13 before commenting on the case. The state of Nevada declined to seek the death penalty but Davis now faces life in prison.
Revisit The FADER’s explainer of the long road to charging Davis with the murder of Tupac Shakur.
