RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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The first week of the Tupac Shakur murder trial featured dramatic opening statements, heated testimony from a former Bloods gang member, and infamous recordings in which defendant Duane “Keffe D” Davis candidly discussed the shooting with police detectives.
You’re reading Billboard’s weekly Tupac trial recap, a one-sheet breakdown of everything that happened in the epic murder case over the past week. Stay tuned here each Friday for all the testimony and big events you might have missed.
As the trial kicked off Monday (Aug. 17) with opening statements, prosecutors told jurors that Davis had orchestrated the 1996 drive-by shooting that killed Tupac as “an act of revenge” after Shakur beat up his nephew. And, as expected, they leaned heavily on statements from the man himself – both in an interview with police and a 2019 tell-all memoir.
“Let’s be clear: Duane Davis did not pull the trigger,” prosecutor Binu Palal told jurors. “You will learn that when the opportunity presented itself for retribution, Duane Davis made sure that the shooters were armed and ready to execute their revenge. And remarkably, you will learn that from Duane Davis himself.”
In his own opener, defense attorney Michael W. Sanft said his client’s statements about he shooting had been fiction and that there was not hard evidence to corroborate them. At one point, he loaded a presentation screen for jurors that just read “Bulls–t” in white text. “Keffe D was known to do this,” the attorney told the jurors, pointing to the card.
After opening statements, jurors immediately began hearing witness testimony – first from Garry Dale , a Las Vegas police officer who witnessed the aftermath of the shooting and rode in the ambulance with Shakur. Dale told jurors that he tried to convince the rapper to say who did it, but that Shakur merely repeated “We’ll take care of it” several times: “I couldn’t get him to talk to me any further than that.”
Testimony on Tuesday included Reggie Wright Jr., a former head of security at Suge Knight ’s Death Row Records, and James McDonald, a former Bloods gang member also linked to Knight. At one point, McDonald sparred with Sanft , suggesting he was hurting Davis’ case. “Talk to your lawyer, man,” McDonald said directly to Davis, before saying to Sanft: “I’m not finna send him to prison. You are!”
On Thursday and Friday, jurors heard a key piece of evidence : audio recordings of meetings in 2008 and 2009 in which Davis discussed the shooting with police detectives. At the time, the investigators told him that “nothing you say today can be used against you,” but the judge overseeing the current case later ruled that Davis waived that immunity by talking about the same events in public.
In the tapes, jurors heard Davis tell detectives that his nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson – the man beaten by Tupac earlier in the night – had fired the shots that killed Shakur. Also in the recordings, Davis suggested that Sean “Diddy” Combs , then known as “Puffy,” was involved in conversations about the killing.
There’s been a long-simmering conspiracy theory that Combs ordered a hit on Shakur as part of the East Coast/West Coast hip-hop rivalry between his Bad Boy Records and Death Row. Combs has consistently denied any involvement in Shakur’s death; after a recent Netflix docuseries advanced the theory, attorneys for the now-imprisoned mogul sent a legal threat calling the project a “shameful hit piece.”
Testimony was also heard Friday from Leonard Jefferson, who took the last-ever photo of Shakur riding in a car with Knight before the shooting that night in Las Vegas. “I said, ‘Ay, what up, Pac?'” testified Jefferson of seeing the duo while stopped at a traffic light before grabbing a 35 millimeter camera out of his central console and snapping the famous picture.
Davis’ trial is set to resume on Monday and run for several more weeks .
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