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A former Southern California street gang leader pleaded not guilty Thursday to orchestrating a drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur in 1996 in Las Vegas.
Duane Keith “Keffe D” Davis, the only person still alive who was in the vehicle from which shots were fired and the only person ever charged with a crime in the case, stood in shackles before Clark County District Judge Tierra Jones.
Special public defenders Robert Arroyo and Charles Cano represented Davis in court Thursday. Davis lost his bid to hire defense attorney, Ross Goodman, who spoke on Davis’ behalf two weeks ago, saying prosecutors lack witnesses and key evidence, including a gun or vehicle, for the killing committed 27 years ago.
Davis, 60, is originally from Compton, California. He was arrested Sept. 29 outside a home in suburban Henderson where Las Vegas police served a search warrant July 17, drawing renewed attention to the unsolved murder of one of hip-hop music’s most enduring icons.
His indictment alleges Davis provided a gun to someone in the Cadillac from which car-to-car gunfire mortally wounded Shakur and wounded rap music mogul Marion “Suge” Knight at an intersection just off the Las Vegas Strip. Shakur died a week later at age 25.
Knight is now 58 and serving a 28-year prison sentence in California for the death of a Compton businessman in 2015.
Prosecutors allege that Shakur’s killing in Las Vegas came out of a fierce rivalry between East Coast and West Coast groups for dominance in a musical genre then dubbed “gangsta rap,” and followed a brawl at a Las Vegas Strip casino involving Shakur and Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.
Prosecutors told a grand jury that Davis implicated himself in the killing in multiple interviews and a 2019 tell-all memoir that described his life leading a Crips sect in Compton.
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