Duane Davis wasn’t arrested for the murder of Tupac Shakur until September 29, but his alleged involvement in the shooting was hardly news. Davis, a South Side Crips member known as Keefe D, was known to police as a suspect shortly after the killing, even if he’d never been charged. Since then, he’s publicly admitted to being in the car that shot Tupac not just in multiple interviews but also in his own memoir.
Following the 2018 series Death Row Chronicles on BET, which featured some of Keefe D’s first public comments on the shooting, Las Vegas police reviewed the case and confirmed it remained open. Police later said, upon Keefe D’s arrest, that this and following interviews led to him being charged. “It wasn’t until 2018 that this case was reinvigorated, as additional information came to light related to this homicide, specifically Duane Davis’s own admissions to his involvement in this homicide investigation that he provided to numerous different media outlets,” Lieutenant Jason Johansson said at a press conference on September 29. When police searched Keefe D’s house in July 2023, they took a copy of his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, co-written with Yusuf Jah, in which he further detailed the shooting.
Keefe D never claimed to have pulled the trigger — that’s said to be his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson. Anderson was allegedly in the back of a Cadillac with Keefe D and two other South Side Crips on September 7, 1996; they pulled up next to Death Row Records head Suge Knight and Tupac in a BMW when shots were fired. (Baby Lane died in an unrelated gang shooting in 1998, but previously denied involvement.) Police now say Keefe D “was the shot caller” of the crew and “orchestrated the plan that was carried out.” Keefe D has not commented on his arrest and has yet to submit a plea. Below, everything he’s previously said about Tupac’s killing.
Police confession
Keefe D first spoke about his involvement in the shooting with Los Angeles police in 2008 for immunity in a PCP ring case. His confession was later reported in a 2011 book, Murder Rap, by Greg Kading, a former detective on the case. L.A. Weekly further reported his comments in a cover story. (The confession was also the basis for the 2018 Netflix series Unsolved, in which Lahmard Tate played Keefe D.) Keefe D told investigators that his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson,” shot Tupac from the car they were in. “If they would have drove on my side, I would have popped them,” Keefe D added. The gun was a Glock .40, he said, from a secret compartment in the armrest. “And I ain’t never told nobody that story, man,” he said.
Keefe D claimed that Sean “Diddy” Combs ordered the hit, allegedly telling him, “Man, I want to get rid of them dudes,” referring to Tupac and Suge Knight. (Combs told L.A. Weekly that Keefe D’s account was “pure fiction and completely ridiculous.”) Keefe D claimed Diddy’s issue with Knight stemmed from Knight’s infamous diss to the Bad Boy executive at the 1995 Source Awards. First, Diddy only wanted Knight, Keefe D would say, but he later targeted Tupac as well after “Hit ’Em Up,” a diss on the Notorious B.I.G. and Bad Boy. “That pissed [Combs] off,” Keefe D claimed. They allegedly settled the terms of the hit at Greenblatt’s Deli, where Keefe D asked for $1 million to kill both Tupac and Knight. Keefe D alleged he told Diddy, “We’ll wipe their ass out quick, man. It’s nothing.” After Tupac’s killing, Keefe D said the South Side Crips never got the alleged $500,000 payment from Diddy.
Unrelated to the shooting, Keefe D also told police that Diddy used his brown 1964 Chevy in Usher’s “Can U Get Wit It” music video. He claimed the car got “fucked up” from the shoot and that Combs paid him $2,500 to get it repainted. Vulture reached out to Diddy for comment on Keefe D’s claims but did not hear back.
Death Row Chronicles on BET
“I’m the only one alive who can really tell you the story about the Tupac killing,” Keefe D said in this 2018 series, explaining that he was finally opening up about what allegedly happened because he had cancer. “I have nothing else to lose,” he added. “All I care about is the truth.” In the series, Keefe D admitted publicly to being in the Cadillac that gunned down Tupac for the first time. He sat in the passenger seat he claimed, with Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown driving and Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson and DeAndre “Freaky” Smith in the back. Keefe D said that they went to Club 662, which was owned by Suge Knight, to wait for Tupac to perform, but left before he showed up. Then, while driving away, they saw Tupac stick his head out of a car after some girls yelled his name. “If he wouldn’t even have been out the window, we would have never seen him,” Keefe D said.
Keefe D’s car then made a U-turn, he said, and they got to a stoplight next to Tupac’s car. “When we pulled up, I was in the front seat,” he said. “Happened to see my friend Suge.” Keefe D then said someone from the back shot Tupac, but did not say whom. “Gonna keep it for the code of the streets,” he said. “It just came from the backseat, bro.”
Compton Street Legend
In his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, Keefe D provided more details to claims he had previously told police. He wrote of an alleged meeting with Diddy at Greenblatt’s where he requested the hit on Tupac and Suge Knight. “Like a lion on the Serengeti, I’m able to smell and see fear,” he wrote. “Puffy was full of fear.” Keefe D wrote that he apparently told Diddy, “That’s not a problem.” He also claimed “Hit ’Em Up” angered the South Side Crips too, because Tupac allegedly said, “If you want to be down with Bad Boy, then fuck you too!”
The South Side Crips had a regular tradition of going to Las Vegas to watch Mike Tyson fight. “Little did I know, this trip to Vegas, unlike the ones before, would change my life,” Keefe D wrote. After the fight, he and the Crips planned to meet in the café at the MGM Grand, but Baby Lane, his nephew, didn’t show up. “Then, some 118 East Coast Crips came and told us that they saw some Death Row niggas jump on my nephew down by the casino,” he said. Just days earlier, one of the South Side Crips had stolen a Death Row chain from a Death Row associate at the Lakewood Mall in California; he had allegedly been part of the group that attacked Baby Lane. Keefe D claimed this made the hit on Tupac more urgent. “When conversations would come up about a million dollar bounty on the heads of Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur, that was business,” he wrote. “But after Tupac, Suge, and them Death Row niggas jumped on my nephew Baby Lane, the shit became ominously personal.”
Keefe D goes on to describe getting a .40 Glock from a man named Zip, who was hanging out with the rapper Foxy Brown. “He turned to me and said, ‘It’s time to get the money,’” Keefe D described. They planned to go to Club 662 for a Death Row afterparty where Tupac was supposed to perform. He wrote that he first planned to confront Knight, whom he had long known. But after Tupac and Knight didn’t show up for an hour and a half, Keefe D called his crew off. “Lucky for them they never showed up because it would have been like Al Capone’s Valentine’s Day Massacre if they had,” he wrote.
When the group stopped to buy champagne, Keefe D moved to the Cadillac with Bubble Up, Freaky, and Baby Lane, and put the Glock in the back. He then described seeing Tupac stick his head out of a BMW, Bubble Up turning their car around, and pulling up next to Tupac and Knight at a stoplight. He wrote that Knight looked “terrified,” and Tupac reached for a gun. “That’s when the fireworks started,” he wrote. “One of my guys from the back seat grabbed the Glock and started bustin’ back.” They then drove off and even saw the two ambulances carrying Tupac and Knight. The group ditched their Cadillac and then “popped our bottles and partied like it was any other night.”
Keefe D showed little remorse writing about the alleged killing. “The moral of the story, real Gangsters, are nothing to fuck with!” he wrote. He went on to call the shooting “another day at the office” and wrote that Tupac’s death was “collateral damage.” He continued:
At this point in my life, I can say that I have a deep sense of remorse for what happened to Tupac. He was a talented artist with tons of potential to impact the world. I hate that Tupac’s family, friends, and fans, especially his mother, Afeni Shakur, had to go through the pain of losing her son. It’s terrible losing people like that; I know that pain too well.
However, I stand firm on the point that Tupac, Suge Knight, and the rest of those niggas didn’t have any business putting their hands on my beloved nephew Baby Lane. Period. Them jumping on my nephew gave us the ultimate green light to do something to their ass.
Tupac chose the wrong game to play and the wrong niggas to play with. Suge and them should have done a better job of protecting that dude because they knew who the fuck we were and the kind of shit we were capable of. Tupac may not have known, but Suge and his peeps definitely knew. Tupac was a guppy that got swallowed up by some ferocious sharks. He shouldn’t have ever got involved in that bullshit of trying to be a thug.
VladTV
Shortly after publishing Compton Street Legend, Keefe D spoke about his life and the Tupac shooting with DJ Vlad. He didn’t expand on many of the book’s details, often responding with some version of, “Let them read about it.” When asked about who in the car shot Tupac, he replied, “I’m not gonna go into details on that one. Keep the streets, homie.” When Vlad read a passage about the moment the shooting began, Keefe D said, “Basically, yeah.”
