Duane Keith Davis and Tupac Shakur
As far back as 1998, Duane Keith Davis was telling a cable channel that he was a front-seat passenger in a car from which a fellow passenger fired the shots that killed Tupac Shakur.
In 2009, Davis, known as “Keffe D,” confessed to police his role in the case, a former detective who investigated the shooting told CNN, but authorities couldn’t immediately use the information.
And then after what police say was a reinvigorated investigation, Davis, 60, was arrested in Las Vegas on Friday, with a grand jury indicting him in the case on charges of murder with the use of a deadly weapon. The arrest comes some 27 years after the rapper was shot as he was leaving a boxing match on the Las Vegas Strip.
The shooting on September 7, 1996, was a retaliatory attack on the 25-year-old star, police said Friday. Authorities allege Davis plotted and orchestrated the shooting in a matter of hours after the rapper and others attacked Davis’ nephew that same day.
Davis is the only suspect in the case who still is alive, police say. Davis has said in a memoir that he’s one of two living witnesses – with the other being a record-label boss who was driving Shakur.
“Over the last five years, we’ve conducted countless interviews and corroborated numerous facts that were not only consistent with the crime scene on the night of the incident, but also corroborated and were consistent with the sequence of events that night,” Jason Johansson, a Las Vegas police homicide lieutenant, said during a news conference Friday.
-CNN