The man arrested on charges related to the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur is speaking out and maintaining his innocence.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis was arrested in September 2023 in connection to Shakur’s death and spoke to ABC News from behind bars at the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas, saying, “I’m innocent.”
“I did not do it,” Davis, 61, said, adding of prosecutors, “They don’t have nothing. And they know they don’t have nothing. They can’t even place me out here. They don’t have no gun, no car, no Keffe D, no nothing.”
“I ain’t killed nobody. Never did, never killed nobody,” Davis added.
According to ABC News, Davis claims he was in Los Angeles at the time of Shakur’s Las Vegas murder and also says there are witnesses who can confirm his alibi.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis in court in Las Vegas in October 2023.
Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool
However, Las Vegas detectives built their case against Davis based on what they say is his own account of the killing, including a 2019 self-published memoir with his name as a co-author.
“I’ve never read the book,” Davis said of the memoir, Compton Street Legend.
“I just gave him details of my life,” Davis said of his co-author. “And he went and did his little investigation and wrote the book on his own.”
Tupac Shakur.
Ron Galella Collection via Getty
Prosecutors alleged that Davis was the gang leader of the Crips in Compton, Calif., referring to him as the “shot caller” on the night of Shakur’s death.
After his arrest, Davis was charged with one count of murder with a gang enhancement, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department announced in a press conference at the time. The department had reopened the investigation into Shakur’s murder that summer.
“Duane Davis was the shot caller for this group of individuals that committed this crime,” said Las Vegas police homicide Lt. Jason Johansson during the press conference, per the Associated Press, “and he orchestrated the plan that was carried out.”
Shakur was killed in a drive-by shooting on the Las Vegas strip in September 1996 after attending Mike Tyson’s fight against Bruce Sheldon with Marion “Suge” Knight. The shooting, in which Shakur was shot four times, occurred when Shakur and Knight, now 59, were driving to Knight’s Las Vegas nightclub and were stopped at a red light. (Knight was also grazed in the head by a bullet.)
A 25-year-old Shakur was rushed to the hospital and lost a lung before succumbing to his wounds nearly a week after the shooting.
In Compton Street Legends, Davis describes himself and Knight as the “only living eyewitnesses to the deadly confrontation on the Las Vegas strip between the occupants of our two vehicles,” according to the book’s description on Amazon.
