Tupac Shakur’s Murder Trial Is Finally Here, 30 Years After Infamous Hip-Hop Crime
Categoria: Musica
The rapper's 1996 killing is headed for a courtroom showdown at last. Here's everything you need to know.
Por Billboard | 06/08/2026
A jury trial for a man accused of masterminding the murder of Tupac Shakur is finally set to start next week, more than three decades after the rap legend’s 1996 killing. The Las Vegas drive-by shooting that killed Tupac has long been one of music’s great unsolved mysteries. But Duane “Keffe D” Davis was arrested in September 2023 and charged with first-degree murder over allegations that he orchestrated the attack. Related Tupac Shakur’s Family Hires Team to Investigate Potential Link to Diddy BE:FIRST Is Ready for the World: Inside the J-Pop Superstars' Long-Planned U.S. Breakthrough Glenn A. Baker, Australian Music Historian and Former Billboard Correspondent, Dies at 74 After three years of litigation and appeals, a trial will at last kick off Monday morning (Aug. 10) with jury selection in a Las Vegas courtroom. After a jury is picked, the proceedings are expected to run at least four weeks; if he’s convicted at the end, Davis, 63, could be sentenced to life in prison without parole. Despite previous statements in which he linked himself to the shooting, Davis now steadfastly maintains his innocence. “I wasn’t in Nevada, period,” Davis said in a local television interview last week. On the night of Sept. 7, 1996, Shakur was in the passenger seat of a car driven by Death Row Records boss Suge Knight after a Mike Tyson boxing match in Las Vegas. When they stopped at a red light, a white Cadillac pulled beside them and a shooter in the backseat opened fire, striking Shakur four times. He died six days later on Sept. 13. The killing, which came amid the infamous East Coast-West Coast hip hop feud, was followed months later by the shooting of friend-turned-rival Notorious B.I.G. Both rappers were then at the peak of their rising careers, and the pair of shootings quickly became fixtures in American cultural history. “You have two guys, two of the brightest stars to emerge out of the hip-hop era in that time, and they’re gone, just like that,” said Joel Anderson, host of Slate ‘s Slow Burn podcast on the killings, in a 2019 interview . Despite rampant theories and rumors, no one was ever charged with either murder. But starting in 2018, Davis began talking about his own involvement in Tupac’s killing. A former Crips gang leader in 1990s Los Angeles, Davis gave media interviews and released a 2019 memoir called Compton Street Legend in which he admitted he was in the car during the attack and had obtained the .40 handgun that was used. Davis described the shooting as part of a broader gang war between Los Angeles Bloods and Crips that had come to overlap with the hip-hop feud — a dispute that escalated further when Shakur and others beat up Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, earlier in the night at the MGM Grand hotel: “Tupac chose the wrong game to play,” Davis wrote in the book. The book didn’t say who actua