Nearly two years after he was arrested in Las Vegas on suspicion of ordering the 1996 drive-by shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur, Duane “Keffe D” Davis has given his side of the story.
In a jailhouse interview conducted by ABC News out Thursday, Davis insisted that he is innocent of any wrongdoing involved in Shakur’s long-unsolved death. “I’m innocent,” he plainly told the outlet. “I did not do it.”
Shakur, an acclaimed rapper, activist, poet and actor (his film credits include roles in John Singleton’s “Poetic Justice” and Ernest Dickerson’s “Juice”), was sitting in a car driven by Death Row Records founder Suge Knight on the Las Vegas Strip on Sept. 7, 1996, when a white Cadillac pulled up alongside them. A shooter in the Cadillac’s backseat opened fire, spraying the other car with bullets.
Shakur was hit four times and died six days later from his gunshot wounds. He was only 25. The crime, which shook the hip-hop world, went unsolved until Las Vegas police arrested Davis in Sept. 2023 and a Nevada grand jury indicted him on one count of murder with a deadly weapon.
At the time, Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo said that authorities believed Davis is the man who “ordered the death” of Shakur.
Davis, who has pleaded not guilty to the murder charge against him, told ABC News he is a “good man” who has moved on from his days as a gangster in Compton, California. “I did everything they asked me to do. Get new friends. Stop selling drugs. I stopped all that,” he said. “I’m supposed to be out there enjoying my twilight at one of my f—king grandson’s football games and basketball games; enjoying life with my kids.”
Vegas authorities’ case against Davis is largely built on his own comments about Shakur’s killing, compiled from multiple interviews he gave over the years, as well as remarks made in his 2019 memoir titled “Compton Street Legend,” which Davis is credited as a co-author of alongside Yusuf Jah. Davis now not only claims that he did not co-write the book, but that he hasn’t even read it.
“I just gave him details of my life,” Davis said of Jah. “And he went and did his little investigation and wrote the book on his own.” He has walked back some of his past claims, including that he was sitting in the Cadillac that pulled up alongside Shakur and Knight’s car. Davis now says that he was “in Los Angeles” the night of the drive-by shooting and that he has “about 20 or 30 people going to come” to his trial to corroborate his whereabouts.
“They don’t have nothing. And they know they don’t have nothing,” Davis said of those prosecuting him. “They can’t even place me out here. They don’t have no gun, no car, no Keffe D, no nothing.”
He further alleged that he was “paid” to play up his involvement in Shakur’s murder in his past media appearances and memoir and argues that any confessions he gave to the police are connected to a “proffer agreement” he made with a Los Angeles task force in 2008 that granted him immunity in return for information. Claiming that he only told the police what they wanted to hear so they would “let me go,” Davis added, “I’m not even supposed to be in jail. A deal is a deal.”
In his interview with ABC News, the he additionally accused Reggie Wright Jr., a former cop responsible for partly running Knight and Shakur’s security operations the night of the shooting, of being the actual “lead suspect” in the murder. Wright Jr. testified before the grand jury that indicted Davis and has said that he spent a large part of that infamous 1996 night in a club that Knight and Shakur were planning on visiting before the shooting.
Wright has denied any involvement in the shooting that killed Shakur.
Davis, for his part, insists that he will survive and come out the other side of his trial a free man. “God got my back, and God will see me through this,” he told ABC News. “He had my back with cancer, I survived the streets and the FBI. That’s a big accomplishment for a man from Compton.” His trial is currently set for Feb. 9, 2026.
Davis’ comments come just a week after a male escort filed a lawsuit against disgraced music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs accusing him of sexual assault in 2012. The escort claims in his suit that Diddy subsequently threatened to have him killed the same way he managed to “get Pac hit.”
