On September 7, 1996, rapper and actor Tupac Shakur was attending a boxing match in Las Vegas featuring Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon.
After he left the match, Shakur was riding in the passenger seat of Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight’s BMW. They made a stop at the corner of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane. Then, a gunman pulled alongside and fired four shots, hitting Shakur twice in the chest and grazing Knight’s head.
The BMW jumped a curb and came to a rest. Shakur was transported to the UNLV Medical Center, where he lay in a coma for six days. On September 13, 1996, Shakur Shakur was pronounced dead at the age of 25.
Thirty years later, the murder has taken on a mythic dimension, particularly since the killer’s identity remained a mystery. Various theories have emerged over the past three decades.
Did Suge Knight orchestrate the hit because Shakur was poised to leave Death Row Records? Was Shakur’s friend-turned-rival, the Notorious B.I.G., and the Sean "Diddy" Combs-run label Bad Boy Records, involved as part of the East Coast-West Coast rap war? Or perhaps, did Shakur fake the whole thing and is still alive today?
Thirty years without Shakur feels unfathomable given the mark he made on the industry in the short time before his death.
“It’s hard,” hip-hop journalist Rob Marriott tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Pac resonated because he intentionally made himself into a mythic figure. He chose to become that. He was very astute in hip-hop, and he manifested it in his own life.”
Did Duane Davis Kill Tupac Shakur?
In 2018, former Los Angeles Crips gang member Duane "Keffe D" Davis, an uncle of one-time suspect and fellow Crip Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, claimed in the 2018 documentary Death Row Chronicles that he was in the passenger seat of a white Cadillac where the shots came from.
He said that the shooter was in the backseat and the other passengers included Anderson, Terrence "T-Brown" Brown and DeAndrae "Dre" Smith—all of whom were members of the South Side Crips and are now dead.
In 2023, the Las Vegas Police Department executed a search warrant of a home that had belonged to Davis’s wife. Davis was then arrested and charged with murder on September 29, 2023.
However, prosecutors have not accused Davis of firing the shots that killed Shakur. Rather, they allege Davis orchestrated the shooting in retaliation for a fight at a casino hours earlier involving Shakur and Davis’s nephew, Anderson. Someone who helps another person commit murder can be convicted of the crime under Nevada law.
He pleaded not guilty, was held without bail and will not face the death penalty. Davis faces life imprisonment without parole if convicted.
On August 10, 2026, Davis's trial got underway. The prosecution argued that Davis was out for revenge on Tupac and Knight after the altercation with Anderson. They defined Davis as the “shot caller" for the Southside Crips. He was the one who obtained the weapon used in the murder.
They also entered his previous confessions as evidence.
The defense argued that Davis had exaggerated his stories to make money. They also said that the weapon had never been recovered nor had the white Cadillac.
The jury began its deliberations three weeks later. On August 31, the jury found Davis guilty of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon. He is set to face life in prison without parole during his sentencing hearing on October 13.
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Sean "Diddy" Combs was sentenced to 50 months behind bars.
Sean "Diddy" Combs was sentenced to 50 months behind bars.
Tupac Shakur’s Controversial Past
As a child, Shakur was immersed in the black freedom struggle. His mother Afeni Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party and one of the Panther 21, a group of Panthers that were indicted on conspiracy charges related to alleged pre-planned bombings of police stations.
Afeni represented herself in the 1969 trial and was pregnant with Shakur at the time. She was acquitted in 1971, and Shakur was born on June 16 as Lesane Parish Crooks.
Shakur trained at the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he attended and befriended future actor Jada Pinkett Smith.
By the 1990s, Shakur made it a point to use his music as a vestige for black politics in songs such as “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” “Trapped,” “Holler If Ya Hear Me” and “Keep Ya Head Up. At the same time, Shakur generated controversy for lyrical content and a rap sheet that included charges of shooting off-duty police officers and a conviction for sexual battery in 1994.
He starred in cult classic movies such as Juice, Poetic Justice, Above the Rim, Gang Related and Gridlockd.
“He was clearly on this route to a superstar; he was internet-savvy before the internet,” Marriot says. “He is a person who would have done enormously well with social media. He was kind of a pre-internet sensation, and everybody became what he was already. He knew how to go viral before viral was a thing.”
Following Shakur’s killing and the subsequent murder of the Notorious B.I.G. in March 1997, the hip-hop world of had to assess how coastal beefs led to tragedy.
“It was the first time that hip-hop had to confront itself about the consequences of this kind of reality rap, gangster music, and what that would lead to,” Marriot says. “Hip-hop had to deal with the lethal consequences of saying those kinds of words.”
