Las Vegas Police Charge Man With Tupac Shakur's Murder

Three decades after it took place, the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur still casts a long shadow over popular culture. There are plenty of reasons why it remains such a compelling event, from the narrative of an artist who, at just 25 years of age, died far too young to the mysterious circumstances around his death that have inspired a string of true crime content in the years that followed.

Now, 27 years after Shakur’s murder, Las Vegas police have charged a man in the case. Earlier on Friday, the Associated Press’s Rio Yamat and Ken Ritter reported that the police department in question had arrested Duane “Keffe D” Davis, though the charges on which he was arrested were a mystery at the time. A few hours later, more details on the arrest emerged, including the nature of the charges against Davis.

Writing at the New York Times, Julia Jacobs and Joe Coscarelli reported that a court has indicted Davis on one count of murder for his role in Shakur’s death. That Davis was on the scene for the murder is not in doubt; as Jacobs and Coscarelli report, Davis has been open about the fact that he was in the vehicle from which Shakur was shot on that September night in 1996.

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This follows the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department serving a warrant in the case in July. As the Associated Press noted in their report on the case, the warrant resulted in a search of Davis’s wife’s home. Davis’s memoir Compton Street Legend was published in 2019. At the time of its release, one of the selling points behind the book was Davis’s candor and revelation of previously-unknown details of the killing. It’s not yet clear whether or not some of that same candor may have led to his arrest today.