The trial for the murder of late rapper Tupac Shakur is underway nearly 30 years after he was gunned down in Las Vegas.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis is accused of orchestrating the 1996 killing that’s had the hip-hop industry shook for decades.
Prosecutors have built a case around Davis’s accounts of what took place on the night of Sept. 7, 1996.
Opening statements are currently in progress in a Los Angeles courtroom on Monday, Aug, 17, beginning at 9:30 a.m.
Marion “Suge” Knight, then the head of Death Row Records, was driving the BMW with Tupac in the passenger seat when the shooting occurred.
A gunman opened fire on the passenger side at the corner of East Flamingo Road in Las Vegas.
Knight walked away with fragments to the head and survived, while “the Calfornia Love” rapper was shot four times. Shakur died six days later at 25.
Now, the man who once stood beside him wants no part in closing the case of someone he called a friend and brother.
“This trial has nothing to do with me and if somebody brings me there,” Knight told ABC News in an interview from prison last week. “It’s gonna hurt whoever brings me there. I promise you that.”
Knight didn’t leave the threat vague, saying, “Leave me out of it.”
He warned, “They make me come there against my will, if Keffe D’s lawyers bring me there, it [won’t] look good for him. If the prosecution brings me there, it won’t look good for them.”
Tupac and Suge Knight had one of the most complicated relationships in hip-hop.
— Sound_Dealer (@bigharris1212) August 15, 2026
Business partners. Friends. Brothers at times. Their story was never simple. pic.twitter.com/98Cgw5YJd6
Davis’s arrest came after Las Vegas police found evidence related to the slaying in a home he shared with his wife, Paula Clemens.
They seized laptops, a VIBE Magazine issue featuring Shakur, nearly a dozen .40-caliber bullets and his 2019 book “Compton Street Legend.”
Davis spent years going to platforms to tell his story. He claimed that he rode in the front seat of a white Cadillac that pulled alongside Shakur’s BMW the night of the shooting.
In police interviews, on camera for a documentary, and across his 2019 memoir Davis wrote that he pulled out a Glock and tossed it into the back seat. His attorneys now say he spun that story for attention and a paycheck rather than confessing to anything.
Prosecutors charged Davis, the former Crips member, with murder with a deadly weapon with intent to promote, further, or assist a criminal gang. He has pleaded not guilty since his arrest in September 2023.
Jury selection opened Monday, Aug. 10, before Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny. The full proceeding is projected to run about four weeks.
Knight isn’t the only name on the potential witness list. According to IBTimes, Prosecutors have also floated Sean “Diddy” Combs, whose Bad Boy Records sat on the opposite side of the coastal rivalry that impacted both labels.
That claim runs directly into three decades of his own words.
As previously reported, Davis has repeatedly described his role, revealing he allegedly supplied the gun to his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, in his memoir.
Knight finds the defense strategy almost insulting.
“Everything he said and talked about, he already told on himself,” Knight told ABC News. “So, what are you going to do? Erase all the recordings of the interviews he did?”
Davis has an answer for that, and it’s the backbone of his defense. He now says those confessions were fiction and that the memoir, the documentary sit-downs, and the interviews where he placed himself in the car were embellishments sold for attention and a check, not testimony.
Honestly why even have a trial, Keefe D literally told everything that happened the night 2Pac got murdered and was laughing about it on Vlad .
— Black Sheep (@ChillGodDee) August 14, 2026
Shakur and Knight had spent the evening at the MGM Grand watching Mike Tyson fight on the night leading up to the rapper’s death.
In the lobby afterward, they ran into Anderson, who had allegedly taken part in a robbery over a Death Row Records pendant months earlier. Shakur and Knight jumped him. Hotel cameras caught all of it.
Prosecutors say Davis and his associates spent the rest of the night hunting for payback, per NPR.
Shakur’s relationship with Knight explains why he was in that car. In 1995, Knight posted Shakur’s roughly $3 million bond for a three-album Death Row deal. Days later, Shakur flew to L.A. to record “All Eyez on Me.” Less than a year later, he was dead.
But Knight has always framed their relationship as love. A week after the shooting, he told MTV’s Abbie Kearse that the bond ran past business, according to The Atlanta Voice: “Tupac loved Death Row. Tupac loved me. I loved him.”
Knight, meanwhile, has his own reasons for staying quiet. The 61-year-old is serving 28 years in California for voluntary manslaughter after pleading no contest in 2018 to running over and killing Terry Carter outside a Compton burger stand.
