Uncle Of Prime Suspect In Tupac’s Death Claims To Know Identity Of Rapper’s Murderer
More than two decades after his death in a hail of bullets, new details are emerging in the murder of Tupac Shakur. The USA Network documentary Unsolved: The Murders Of Tupac And The Notorious B.I.G. contains a confession from former gang member Keffe D (born Duane Keith Davis), who claims that he was in a car driving around on the Las Vegas strip on the night of 9/7/1996, when some shots “just came from the backseat.” Davis, who confessed that he knows the identity of the shooter — whose name he won’t give up due to “street code” — says he made the revelation under immunity from prosecution; he made similar claims in a another recent doc, BET’s Death Row Chronicles.
Tupac, 25, was hit with four bullets during the still-unsolved drive-by shooting and died four days later. The details surrounding the rapper’s death have been a subject of breathless speculation for more than 20 years, spawning dozens of theories, but, to date, no arrests or prosecutions. “I was a Compton kingpin, drug dealer, I’m the only one alive who can really tell you the story about the Tupac killing,” Davis says in the tape, according to an Esquire report.
“People have been pursuing me for 20 years, I’m coming out now because I have cancer, and I have nothing else to lose. All I care about now is the truth.” Most theories surrounding the murder involve a tie to the beating of a Crips gang member, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, who was caught on tape being assaulted by Shakur, Death Row boss Marion “Suge” Knight, and several others three hours before the rapper’s death. Following the altercation, Davis says he and his crew drove around the Vegas strip in search of Shakur.
“All the chicks was like ‘Tupac’, and he was like, ‘Hey’, like a celebrity, like he was in a parade,” Davis says in the Chronicles episode that first aired in February. “If he wouldn’t even have been out the window we would have never have seen him.” Anderson, who was killed in a shootout at a Compton carwash in May 1998, was detained by Los Angeles police in Compton a month after the shooting in an unrelated investigation but never charged in the Shakur murder.
Davis claims he was in the front passenger seat of the car, while his cousin, Anderson, was in the backseat of the vehicle carrying two other Southside Crips gang members. “Going to keep it for the code of the streets,” he says in Chronicles. “It just came from the backseat, bro.” In previous interviews with police Davis has claimed Anderson was the shooter; before his death, Anderson denied being the triggerman.
The Davis quotes have re-surfaced following a recent interview with Unsolved creator Kyle Long, who told the Wrap that “Certainly Keffe D and the Southside Crips killed Tupac Shakur. And it is outrageous that Keffe D is not in jail … In the [Unsolved] finale, when you see why the whole Keffe D thing, how he had immunity and that — long story short, in real life and in the television show, he had immunity to make this confession to the task force.”
And though he was incensed about Davis’ refusal to officially divulge the shooter’s name, ultimately, he said, it “doesn’t matter that he doesn’t say who pulled the trigger … He went live on television [for BET’s Death Row Chronicles] and confessed to being an accessory to murder and the Las Vegas PD, as far as I know, is doing nothing about it. I just think it’s outrageous. I just don’t understand it. It makes me upset. And it’s just crazy town to me. It is so wild that a guy can — and I don’t know what kind of lawyer he has telling him to go on this television show and talk about it, but you know, it’s crazy. So that’s my rant about Keffe D and the Tupac murder, like to me, that murder, you could go arrest someone for that right now.”
This article originally appeared on Billboard.