Who killed Tupac? What to know about the trial of Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis
Three decades after rapper Tupac Shakur’s death, a former California gang boss is the first person to be prosecuted.
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Who is Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis, accused of orchestrating Tupac’s killing?
Davis is the only person to have ever been put on trial for killing Tupac. He entered a not guilty plea in November 2023.
Davis is the former leader of the South Side Compton Crips, a California gang that has long been suspected of playing a part in Tupac’s murder. The gang had a rivalry with the Mob Piru gang, of which Tupac and Knight were affiliates.
Davis has been in jail since 2023 awaiting trial for his role in Tupac’s murder. In 2025, Davis was found guilty of battery following a fight in jail, Nevada media reported.
Why is a trial for Tupac’s killing happening now?
This trial is happening entirely because of Davis’s own words. His 2019 memoir – titled Compton Street Legend – opens in Las Vegas on the night of Tupac’s killing, and Davis explains in detail how he hunted the rapper and Knight through the city over the fight involving his nephew.
He wrote that he got a gun, entered a Cadillac with three others and drove around looking for Tupac and Knight. They spotted Tupac in a car and then pulled up next to it, he wrote.
“No words exchanged, the time for talking had passed, the s*** was about to go down!” his memoir reads.
He said the killing was a direct retaliation for the beating of his nephew, Anderson: “We couldn’t let no record company studio gangsters do us like that,” Davis wrote.
In interviews published on YouTube in recent years, Davis has spoken in granular detail about the night Tupac was shot, including revealing he thought that Knight had been killed in the first shot, which streets he and the others in the car waited on to find Tupac, and who played what role in the attack that night.
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He has not named who fired the gun.
What can we expect from the trial?
The trial starts on Monday and is expected to last four to six weeks.
Its outcome hinges on Davis’s own admissions in his books and in tell-all interviews released since his memoir was published. Davis’s defence tried unsuccessfully to have his memoir excluded from the trial.
Under Nevada law, Davis can be charged with murder if he is found to have orchestrated Tupac’s killing, even if it was not him who pulled the trigger.
The result will boil down to whether the jury believes that Davis’s claims made in his memoir and elsewhere since 2019 were truthful or fabricated, as the defence will claim.
Prosecutors expect to call between 35 and 45 people to the stand, including police, technical witnesses and associates of both Tupac and Davis.
Knight is one of the few people directly involved in the incident to still be alive, but is currently serving a 28-year prison sentence for running over and killing a Compton businessman in 2015. He has said he wants no part in the trial, but is on the witness list and may be summoned.
The defence intends to call only a handful of witnesses. They have not said whether Davis will testify.