The Man Who Talked Himself Into a Murder Trial: Keffe D's Day in Court

Thirty years after Tupac Shakur was shot dead in Las Vegas, the only man who says he was in the shooter's car is finally facing a jury. The prosecution's star witness is the defendant himself.

On September 7, 1996, Tupac Shakur attended the Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, got into a brawl in the lobby with Orlando 'Baby Lane' Anderson — nephew of Duane 'Keffe D' Davis — and was dead within days, shot eight times from a white Cadillac just off the Strip while riding with Death Row Records founder Marion 'Suge' Knight. For nearly three decades, no one was charged. Then Davis wrote a book. The trial that opened Monday in Las Vegas is structurally unlike most murder prosecutions. Davis, 63, has pleaded not guilty, but the prosecution's central exhibit is Davis's own 2019 memoir, in which he places himself in the Cadillac and describes the sequence of events leading to the shooting in his own words: 'One of my guys from the back seat grabbed the Glock and started bustin' back.' Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors Davis 'did not pull the trigger' but planned the shooting as retaliation for the attack on his nephew — and that the jury would hear this from Davis himself. The defense's counter is blunt and not without logic: Davis talked to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies for years, and they did not pursue charges because they did not find him credible. Attorney Michael Sandt framed the memoir not as confession but as self-aggrandizement — Davis and his co-author 'exaggerated in an effort to falsely place himself at the center of it all for personal gain.' A judge denied the motion to exclude the book from trial. The jury of six men and ten women will now decide whether that book is autobiography or fiction. The case carries an unusual evidentiary structure: the prosecution's strongest asset is a document the defendant's own lawyers tried to suppress on the grounds that it overstates his role. That paradox — did Davis incriminate himself or inflate himself? — is the live question the trial will turn on. Prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo put it plainly: 'Had he decided to never write the book, he would not, probably, have ever been prosecuted for the crime.' Members of Shakur's family, including his stepbrother Maurice 'Mopreme' Shakur, sat in the front row behind prosecutors as the trial opened. Davis, in a blue suit and tie, entered and scanned the courtroom audience before taking his seat beside his attorney. The trial is expected to last approximately one month. Davis is the last surviving passenger in the vehicle from which the shots were fired.