It Took 30 Years to Charge a Man Who Wrote a Book About the Murder

Let me get this straight. A man gets shot dead in Las Vegas in 1996. Everybody and their mama knows who did it. The guy who supposedly planned it has told federal agents, documentary crews, and anybody with a microphone that he was in the car and handed over the gun. He literally co-authored a memoir about it. And it took until 2023 for somebody to file charges?

I have questions for the manager. A whole list of them.

Duane “Keffe D” Davis is finally sitting in a courtroom, on trial for the murder of Tupac Shakur, and the best his defense attorney can come up with is that the whole case is “fiction.” Well, sir, if it’s fiction, your client is the author. He wrote the book. Literally. “Compton Street Legend,” 2019. In it, he said he was a passenger in that white Cadillac and he supplied the gun. He told a federal task force the same thing back in 2008. He talked to the FBI in 1998 and 1999. This man has been talking for longer than some of you have been alive.

Now, I’m a simple woman, but where I come from, if you spend two decades telling people you helped kill somebody, that’s not fiction. That’s a confession with a publicity tour.

Here’s what happened that night, according to the people who were there and the security cameras the jury watched this week. Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight beat down Davis’s nephew Orlando Anderson in the MGM Grand lobby. A Las Vegas police officer named Kenneth Rios walked up to Anderson afterward, figured him for a victim, and asked if he wanted to press charges. Anderson said no. The officer wrote it up as basically no crime. Two hours later, somebody rolled up alongside Shakur’s BMW and opened fire.

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The prosecution says Davis planned the shooting as payback. Davis says it didn’t happen. Except Davis already said it did happen. Multiple times. To multiple people. On the record.

And then there’s James “Mob James” McDonald, a member of Shakur’s entourage, hauled into court under subpoena and mad as a hornet about it. He sat up there and told the judge he didn’t want to testify because it “wouldn’t be good” for the defendant. He looked right at Davis and said, “I’m not going to send him to prison, you are.” He said he didn’t want to send the man to prison “even though we don’t like each other.”

Bless his heart. A 25-year-old man is dead. Six days in a hospital bed, bullets in his chest and his intestines, doctors took out his lung trying to save him, and this witness is worried about being rude. He’s raising his grandkids now, he says. Teaching them not to be like their paw paw. Well, that’s wonderful. But paw paw is sitting in a courtroom because the grown-ups spent 30 years playing a game where everybody knows who killed somebody and nobody says a word.

That’s not a code. That’s a conspiracy of cowards.

The three other men who were in that Cadillac are dead now. Davis is the last one left. The prosecutor told the jury he’s “the one person who has a hard time being silent.” That’s the truth right there. The man couldn’t