Recently, Las Vegas police finally arrested a suspect in Tupac’s 1996 murder, Duane “Keefe D” Davis.
People ask me if Keefe D is a patsy, and the answer is no. He deserves arrest, and his conviction would provide a first step toward closure. “This is no doubt a pivotal moment,” Tupac’s half-sister Sekyiwa Shakur told AP. “The silence of the past 27 years surrounding this case has spoken loudly in our community.”
But nobody believes Keefe D killed Tupac. He’s merely accused of being the ringleader in the murder plot. For that reason, this arrest raises more questions than it answers.
I’ll answer some of those questions below.
Who is Keefe D?
Why was he arrested now?
Who did kill Tupac?
Was Diddy involved?
Let’s start by quickly recapping the events precipitating Tupac’s murder on the night of September 7, 1996 in Las Vegas.
*Tupac attended the Mike Tyson fight.
*Afterwards, in the MGM Grand, Tupac and this crewmates beat up a Crip from Compton named Orlando Anderson, who had beef with Tupac’s crew, who were mostly Bloods.
*Later that night, Tupac and Suge Knight drove in Suge’s BMW towards his nightclub, where Tupac and Run-DMC were scheduled to perform.
*Not long after the BMW stopped at an intersection — and Tupac fans recognized him and began screaming — a white Cadillac going in the opposite direction did a U-turn and pulled up next to them.
*Someone fired into the BMW with a .40 caliber Glock, grazing Suge and hitting Tupac four times. He was pronounced dead about a week later.
Though there were many witnesses, Las Vegas police struggled from the start. They were not helped by Suge, who famously said, “I don’t get paid to solve homicides.”
The investigation finally gained traction a decade later, by a different police department — LAPD. Detective Greg Kading focused in on Keefe D, Orlando Anderson’s uncle, a Compton gangbanger and drug trafficker facing years in prison following a drug bust.
Keefe D told Kading that he himself was in the white Cadillac, and that his nephew Orlando Anderson pulled the trigger.
Anderson could not speak up for himself. He had been murdered years earlier, in an unrelated incident.
For reasons unclear, LAPD let Kading’s case languish. No one was charged, and, in the ensuing years, Keefe D more or less made a living taking credit for Tupac’s death. He even wrote a 2019 memoir called Compton Street Legend, in which he admitted providing the murder weapon.
It seems likely, then, that Keefe D’s penchant for self-incrimination is what finally inspired Las Vegas PD to arrest him. The fruit was hanging so low that it would have been embarrassing not to grab it.
But I wouldn’t say this case is closed. Far from it. I’m not at all convinced that Orlando Anderson was the shooter. In fact, I believe the likely killer was…