For all the mythic stature of Tupac Shakur, you’d have expected his murder trial to have been held somewhere with a little more grandeur. Maybe the Las Vegas Motor Speedway or the Thomas & Mack Center, a basketball and concert arena whose gala opening starred Frank Sinatra and Diana Ross. But for the last two weeks, jurors, bailiffs, members of the press, fans, and the families of Shakur and the defendant, Duane “Keffe D” Davis, packed tightly into a cramped windowless courtroom that felt barely bigger than the box of Cuban cigars that Death Row CEO Suge Knight loved to smoke.
For 30 years, the killing of 2Pac has occupied the same American conspiratorial headspace as the Malcolm X assassination, Elvis sightings, and Roswell — a mystery that bred its own industrial complex, complete with fake death theories and amateur numerologists. Then, in September 2023, a Clark County grand jury indicted Davis, a reputed shot caller for the South Side Compton Crips, for murder with a deadly weapon.
The state alleged that Davis obtained and handed off a .40-caliber Glock to his nephew, Orlando Anderson, who prosecutors say fired the fatal shots that killed the 25-year-old rapper just off the Las Vegas Strip on Sept. 7, 1996. Their theory of the case was Occam’s Razor simple: a revenge slaying that occurred roughly two and a half hours after Shakur, Knight, and some of their Death Row henchmen stomped out Anderson following a Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand.
Most of the evidence heard by the jury came from Davis himself — including a secretly recorded 2008 proffer agreement given to a federal task force, a subsequent interview with a Las Vegas Metro homicide detective, appearances on pay-to-play podcasts and BET’s Death Row Chronicles docuseries, and his own book, Compton Street Legend.
The defense denied the allegations, claiming that Davis was a serial fabulist seeking to entertain and profit off long-standing rumors connecting him to the case. The state was unable to produce the murder weapon, the identity of whoever rented the white Cadillac that witnesses say fired on Shakur, or any tangible documentation that Davis was in Las Vegas the night of the murder. During opening statements, defense attorney Michael Sanft summed up his case on a single PowerPoint slide: my client is just a “bullshitter.”
During the trial, the easily understood cause-and-effect theory of the killing became entangled in the labyrinth that has characterized the last 30 years of whodunit theories: there were allegations of a role played by Bad Boy CEO Sean “Diddy” Combs in the murder, accusations of law enforcement corruption, the interconnectedness with the 1997 homicide of Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, and enough far-fetched speculation to give even Candace Owens pause.
The trial was far more than a series of witnesses assembled to prove who killed 2Pac. It doubled as a history of Compton gang life and the story of the Death Row and Bad Boy beef. It was an indictment of hip-hop’s warped, symbiotic relationship with the media and an explanation of why it took law enforcement nearly three decades to make an arrest. This was no gangsta rap Nuremberg, but rather something closer to the trial of Adolf Eichmann — a case tried decades later in which the aging defendant wasn’t the actual killer but a banal middleman, a functionary and a lethal node of transport.
It all leads to this moment in courtroom 12B. After barely two hours of deliberation, the jury reaches a verdict, causing the defendant and Shakur’s families to rush back to the twelfth floor. A bailiff politely instructs the 2Pac acolytes who have flocked from across the country in search of long-deferred justice:
“We have to treat this as a really reverent thing. Be calm, quiet, and respectful,” says the burly marshal wearing a baseball cap and pointed gray goatee. “This is a big day, we know.”
The defendant and his attorney, Michael Sanft, wrap arms around one another, whispering a few final thoughts before the moment of judgment. The prosecutors, Marc DiGiacomo and Binu Palal, seem loose, confident that the speed of the jury’s decision is evidence in their favor. A couple of audience members nervously crack jokes to break the tension, but no one laughs. And when the creaky door opens to allow in the jury members, everyone snaps back in their seats.
The room grows as silent as this whirling slot machine of a city can get. A jury foreman passes the verdict to Judge Carli Kierny.
Most of Shakur’s surviving family stare intensely ahead — including his sister Sekyiwa, his stepbrother and collaborator, Mopreme Shakur, and his extended clan. The judge tells Davis, 63 years old, to stand up to receive the verdict. Facing life imprisonment, he flashes a somber glower toward the judge, his hangdog facial features drooping even heavier.
Kierny informs him of his fate:
“We the jury find the defendant Duane Keith Davis as follows — Count One. Murder with the use of a deadly weapon. Guilty.”
Shakur’s sister fights back tears. A relative next to her offers a box of tissues and she dries her eyes. In the first row, his family holds each other’s hands tightly, remaining silent but visibly filled with gratitude.
On the other side of the bench, Davis’ son remains stoic, but closes his eyes, leaning against the uncomfortable cloth seats, devastated at the prospect of losing his father to the penitentiary system.
For a few seconds, the courtroom grows completely quiet. No visible joy, no exaltation, no loud weeping. Then Davis is escorted out, raising his fist to his son and the rest of the gallery. The prosecutors hug Shakur’s family, who can finally exhale. His sister continues to weep. One of his cousins raises a fist in triumph as everyone files out, completely stunned that this day actually arrived. There is nothing to celebrate, merely a tremendous sigh of relief.
* * *
The questions were the same for three decades. What really happened to Shakur on that snake-eyed night in Las Vegas? And how was it possible that law enforcement never charged anyone for the crime despite decades of credible-seeming rumors and outright admissions?
No one stated the paradox more succinctly than Chris Rock: “2Pac was gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip after a Mike Tyson fight. How many witnesses do you need to see some shit before you arrest somebody? More people saw 2Pac get shot than the last episode of Seinfeld.”
The trial played out like a crash course in the Bad Boy and Death Row feud that preceded the violence in Las Vegas, as well as the retaliatory Compton gang war that followed Shakur’s death. The state’s final witness, former Compton gang unit detective Robert Ladd, described the carnage as “ten days of hell,” where three were killed and ten more wounded.
Some of the next-to-last moments of Shakur’s life were exhibited to the jury inside this 19-story, pink sandstone and glass fortress downtown — its walls etched with quotes from Margaret Thatcher and St. Augustine about the importance of personal responsibility and hearing the other side. In these clips, Shakur celebrates in the backstage arteries of the MGM’s Grand Garden arena directly after Tyson’s victory over Bruce Seldon. He throws mini-uppercuts. His shirt is almost fully unbuttoned, chain dangling, looking for a target to direct his adrenaline rush. It’s Sept. 7, 1996. He’s 25 years old. Out on bail. For all the morbid premonitions of his music, he appears untouchable.
We next spot the multi-platinum superstar as a jumbled blur on surveillance cameras: Shakur punches and tackles Anderson, better known as “Baby Lane” within his faction of the Crips. Joined by his crew, Shakur stomps him out before the stunned gamblers and boxing fans. Then, a horde of onlookers zombie-stagger after Shakur and Knight, out of the casino, toward Las Vegas Boulevard. In open court, everyone watches this grainy security footage like the Zapruder film.
The MGM fight was said to be the result of one of Shakur and Knight’s entourage members pointing out Anderson, a Crip rival, who’d allegedly stolen a Death Row chain from him in a fight in Lakewood a few months earlier. The inciting incident behind the murder of one of the greatest rappers of all time very well might have been triggered by an ostensibly insignificant brawl at a mall Foot Locker. But no police reports were written at the time. No employees offered testimony. The only living witness to that day who took the stand, an ex-South Side Compton Crip named Devonta “Dirt Rock” Lee, was subpoenaed and forced to testify upon threat of being held in contempt of court.
Wearing a gray designer t-shirt and a pair of dangling gold Jesus pieces, Lee looked like a colonoscopy would’ve been less invasive. Nonetheless, he corroborated the basic details of the mayhem: the disrespect the chain snatching meant to Death Row, the fight that got so out of hand that the Foot Locker had to be remodeled, and the looming violence fulfilled in Las Vegas.
About a year before Shakur’s murder, Knight declared war from the podium of the 1995 Source Awards, mocking an unnamed executive producer (obviously Combs) for being “all in the videos, all on the records…dancing.” In his own speech at the New York awards show, Combs attempted to make peace, but in September 1995, one of Knight’s close Compton friends and bodyguards, Jake Robles, was shot and killed at an Atlanta nightclub.
According to the testimony of Reggie Wright Jr., the ex-head of Death Row security and a fixture in three decades of competing theories about Shakur’s death, “the story that was told to us” was that someone in Bad Boy was associated with his murder. A few weeks later, Knight bailed Shakur out of a New York State prison, pending his appeal on a first-degree sexual abuse conviction. Suspicious that the Notorious B.I.G. and Combs had set him up to be shot in 1994, Shakur began eviscerating Bad Boy, too. This was around the same time that Combs put a bounty on Knight and Shakur’s heads, according to Keffe D’s original statements to detectives.
“He said that he’d give anything for these guys’ heads,” Davis said in a recording that was played for the jury in its entirety.
Combs allegedly declared this in an Anaheim hotel suite after a Bad Boy concert, in front of then-CEO of Motown, Andre Harrell, and about 40 members of the South Side Compton Crips. Keffe D claimed that Combs was “scared to death” of the “Big CEO” (Knight), and had enlisted the Crips to protect him on his West Coast trips.
By the spring of 1996, tensions between the two labels and their gang member praetorian guards escalated to the point where a Crip tasked to protect Combs allegedly pulled out a gun on Death Row after the 1996 Soul Train Awards. Wright Jr. corroborated it. Then about three months before his murder, Shakur dropped “Hit ‘Em Up,” a scorched earth diss song that opens with him bragging about sleeping with Biggie’s wife.
Shortly thereafter, Keffe D said that Combs summoned him to a late night rendezvous at Greenblatt’s Deli on the Sunset Strip, where the hot-headed impresario reaffirmed his desire to eliminate Knight and Pac.
“I took him downstairs and he’s like, ‘Man, I got to get rid of them dudes, man. They going to be a problem,” Keffe D said in a recording played in court.
“After that “Hit ‘Em Up” came out,” he continued. “Yeah, that pissed them off.”
The investigators attempted to have Davis clarify:
“So he’s like, ‘kill both them?”
“Yeah.”
According to Davis, Combs offered a million-dollar reward. He accepted and joked in his statement to investigators that he would’ve happily had them whacked for $50,000. Over the years, Combs has repeatedly denied these accusations.
The jury heard Davis tell the story over and over, across three decades, and none of the versions entirely aligned.
The first came in 1998, after a federal drug arrest that sent him to prison for five and a half years. Interviewed by authorities, Davis denied any knowledge or connection to Shakur’s killing. The statement wasn’t recorded but reached the jury through testimony from former federal agent Wade Lee. In this version of events, Davis, Anderson, and their girlfriends returned to the Excalibur after the fight at the MGM; he theorized that the culprits may have been Compton police officers working for Death Row.
The second came a decade later. In 2008, a federal task force working the Notorious B.I.G. murder ensnared Davis in a narcotics case. Facing the prospect of dying in prison, he told investigators he had something that would “blow their fucking mind.”
In his statement to a Las Vegas homicide detective, Davis described meeting up in the MGM parking lot with Eric “Von Zip” Martin, the main conduit between him and Combs. The late narcotics kingpin and Harlem entrepreneur was so close to Bad Boy that Biggie Smalls named Martin his son’s “godfather” and Combs frequently referred to him as “uncle.” And in Vegas, Davis claimed that Martin told him that now was the “perfect time” to “handle business,” right before handing him the Glock that supposedly killed Shakur.
In this retelling, Davis sat shotgun in a white Cadillac alongside three other associates from the South Side Crips, including his nephew, Anderson. After lying in wait at Knight’s club, where Shakur was supposed to perform, Davis says that they got frustrated and decided to leave. But right as they left, they spotted Shakur and Knight stalled at the intersection of East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, their presence announced by a carful of girls screaming “2Pac!!” (one of the women refuted this characterization in court).
It was then that Davis claimed that he pulled out the .40-caliber Glock and passed it to the backseat for someone to take aim. In some interviews, Davis was cagey and refused to name the shooter. In others, he stated that Anderson delivered the four fatal shots into Knight’s 750-series BMW. In one statement, Davis admitted that he would’ve been willing to shoot had the Cadillac approached from a different angle. Then he diagrammed their getaway. The gun was never found. He claimed they parked the rental car at a nearby hotel and hid it atop one of the tires. When they returned the next morning it was gone.
The money was never delivered. According to Keffe D’s proffer and subsequent retellings, Martin accepted a half-million from Combs—half the work completed—but never passed it along.
Back in Compton, about three weeks after Shakur’s murder, more than 300 officers drawn from 11 agencies raided 38 residences, seizing a fantastic quantity of rifles, handguns, and machine pistols, $17,000 in cash, and two pounds each of coke, meth, and weed. Twenty-three arrests were made, including Anderson. But no one was willing to talk about the crime that most interested them. Anderson was set free. About 18 months later, he was murdered in Compton over a money dispute, unrelated to Shakur’s murder. He was 23 years old.
After returning home from his penitentiary sentence in the mid-00s, Davis says that he made multiple attempts to reach out to Combs. None of the phone calls were returned.
“I hate the day I met Puff. He destroyed my life,” Davis said in his BET interview played before the jury. “Now he’s super rich. That motherfucker ain’t even send me a pair of Sean John drawers.”
* * *
By any standard, it was a surreal trial. The murder happened when technology was a quirky novelty, not a permanent shadow. There were no cell phone records to place Davis in Las Vegas. Neither DNA nor fingerprints nor hotel or credit card receipts. No iPhone footage of the attack to replay in gruesome slow motion. Except for Davis, everyone who rode in that white Cadillac is dead—the next-to-last survivor, driver Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown, was shot in 2015 at a Compton marijuana dispensary. The only other witness who could identify the shooter is Knight, and you would’ve had a better chance of Shakur walking into the courthouse than Knight swearing to tell the whole truth. There were corroborating witnesses and a little bit of circumstantial evidence, but the verdict hinged upon one man’s repeated admissions of guilt.
The trial was a trail of the dead — a roll call of minor players, long deceased, mentioned in an offhand fragment of testimony. Men whose colorful nicknames once carried weight, lost in practically forgotten street wars only to briefly materialize and quickly vanish: Buntry, Bubble Up, Hen Dog, Big Jake, Heron, Monk.
What the streets couldn’t accomplish, the ravages of age, disease, and stress finished off. In 2012, cancer took Zip Martin. The following year, “Big Frank” Alexander, the bodyguard tasked to protect Shakur in Las Vegas, committed suicide. Russell Poole, the LAPD detective, the first cop to openly link the two murders, is gone. So is Tim “Blondie” Brennan, the Compton gang unit detective, whose old investigative partner, Robert Ladd, openly mourned his friend on the witness stand. Even the original coroner is dead.
It was as much about what and who didn’t appear in court as what did. Despite the best efforts of prosecutors Marc DiGiacomo and Binu Palal, several potential witnesses vanished without a trace. Everyone from former mayor Oscar Goodman to members of the Shakur family, Knight to the current governor of Nevada, Joe Lombardo, popped up on the potential witness list, but nearly all the prominent names weren’t called. None of the truly creative conspiracy theories were litigated for a jury to decide. There were no revelations about FBI surveillance or any proof that Shakur actually absconded to Cuba.
The closest it came was when Leonard Jefferson, the photographer who took Shakur’s famous last photo, described the shooting and the chaos after.
The prosecution asked about the conspiracy theories that metastasized around his photo.
“They said it was a set…A movie scene…The internet does what it does,” Jefferson said, noting that he now works in the film industry as a location art coordinator.
“And did you stage the scene?” the prosecution inquired.
“I did not.”
One of the defense’s chief strategies was to cast doubt on the accuracy of the investigation because the lead Metro detective, Cliff Mogg, took years to file an official police report. But the retired investigator never took the stand. Neither did retired LAPD detective Greg Kading, whose work on the federal task force is widely regarded as having broken open the case.
Before the trial began, Sanft seriously weighed whether to have Davis testify, but presumably, he decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The defense only lasted about half an afternoon. A pair of Metro police officers, working overtime outside of Knight’s house on the night of the murder, testified to seeing a white Cadillac enter and exit the premises. But they couldn’t identify any of the occupants.
The final defense witness was LVMPD homicide detective Dan Long, who described his 2009 interview with Davis, his inability to corroborate any new information about the case, and his failure to obtain an arrest warrant. The DA told him at the time that Davis’ proffer agreement would’ve made it almost impossible for his testimony to be admitted into evidence. It would take Davis another decade of getting paid to tell his story for a judge to let a jury hear it.
Most witnesses were only there to corroborate largely agreed-upon facts. The jury heard from a bike cop who pulled over Knight and Shakur, roughly ten minutes before the shooting. The double-chinned retiree with wispy white hair told the jury that his conversation with Knight was very congenial.
After the attack, the officer rushed to the crime scene and rode with Shakur to the hospital. At several points, he pressed him to identify the assailants. Shakur refused, pointedly repeating, “No, we’ll take care of it.”
One of the original Vegas homicide detectives described the impossibility of getting any worthwhile information from Knight circa ’96.
“I thought he lied to us,” the retired officer said. “He said he didn’t know anything. He couldn’t recognize anybody.”
The only member of Shakur’s camp who testified to witnessing the shooting was his longtime collaborator, Malcolm Greenidge — better known as E.D.I. Mean of The Outlawz. Unable to identify the assailant in the white Cadillac, Greenidge was one of the first to reach Shakur after the shooting. Bleeding heavily, Shakur warned him: “Get down, they’re going to shoot you!!”
Greenidge turned around to see a police shotgun pointed at his head.
* * *
For a rapper as incendiary and provocative as 2Pac, the witnesses and cross-examinations were largely polite and mild-mannered. The lone exceptions arrived on the second day of trial, when the state called two men who worked security for Death Row, Wright Jr. and James “Mob James” McDonald, both of whom were in Vegas that night.
In addition to Knight and Davis, Wright Jr. has long been a person of interest connected to Shakur’s murder. But despite thirty years of allegations from detectives — both professional and YouTube-only — nothing ever stuck. On the stand, Wright Jr. was slick and well-rehearsed, defending himself against the security lapses became unforgivable in the aftermath of Shakur’s shooting.
“If I knew there was going to be the issue that would’ve happened—of course, I would’ve [assigned more security to Shakur],” Wright Jr. said, wearing head-to-toe khaki, his goatee fully grey.
He testified atop a motorized electric scooter, the result of a near-fatal 2020 bout of COVID.
In the hours after the shooting, Wright, 60, said he called his father, who headed up the Compton police’s gang division, to tell him what had happened—and to expect a war between the Death Row connected Piru Bloods and Davis and Anderson’s South Side Crips.
Finally, prosecutors asked him point blank:
“Did you have anything to do with the murder of 2Pac?”
“Absolutely not.”
The defense tried to trip Wright up over his ethical complications and criminal record — a year and a half in federal prison for money laundering and marijuana sales. He told the jury that he’d done ten interviews in the last twelve months, raking in about $2,500 per appearance.
“At some point you instructed Keffe D that he could actually make money doing that YouTube stuff?” the defense asked.
“I did pass [Keffe D’s] number on to a few YouTube channels,” Wright, an inveterate podcast guest and sometime host, responded. “After he and I had this discussion about doing something on my channel. But I refused to pay him, I’m not giving [money to] someone who I believe is 2Pac’s killer.”
The most virally shared testimony came from an ex–Death Row enforcer named James “Mob James” McDonald, who insisted that he be treated as a “hostile witness.” Thirty years ago, McDonald instilled terror into his enemies. Today, he looks like just another respectable grandfather attempting to repent for the wayward errors of his youth. He wore a flannel shirt and glasses. His beard is salt-and-pepper, his scalp is completely bald. If you didn’t know any better, you might think he was a genial pastor.
If Wright Jr. seemed a little too polished to be entirely trusted, McDonald seemed unimpeachable. He swore to tell the truth with a caveat. He was up here against his will, unwilling to go to jail for contempt, and too old to uproot his grandkids somewhere nobody could find them.
“2Pac inherited the beef from Suge and Puffy. Some of us fell victim to it. We allowed ourselves to be a part of the issue,” McDonald said on the stand. “That was a situation between record companies, not gangs. Technically, it wasn’t our business. But when you have young men fresh out of prison who didn’t get the things they wanted, getting a paycheck from Suge — they’ll do anything.”
When the prosecution asked about the tensions between Bad Boy and Death Row, Mob James blurted out, “ARE YOU SERIOUS?”
The courtroom howled.
The morning after Shakur’s shooting, Mob James said he returned to Compton, to “protect the home front.” Without outright agreeing to the prosecution’s thesis, he implicitly supported it.
“The other side was prepared to do things because Orlando [Anderson] got beat up, and that’s something you don’t tolerate,” he said. “You’re going to get repercussions from that.”
“Did it appear to you in any way that Reggie Wright was coordinating the murder of 2Pac?” Mob James was asked.
“Impossible,” he said with conviction. “If Reggie killed 2Pac, then Death Row is over with. He was the money source. He was that guy at Death Row. Reggie would’ve had a problem if he did, and I believe Knight would’ve opened his mouth and said something [had he done] that.”
During his cross-examination, the pain became obvious in McDonald’s grimace. He told the room that bringing up the dead is wrong. He cryptically alluded to things that “people ain’t talked about in thirty years. And today ain’t one of them.” He responded wearily, a man court-ordered to rehash the worst moments of his life.
Finally, when the defense kept pushing him to go deeper into the conflict that culminated in Shakur’s murder, James exploded:
“You’re asking me a question I can’t answer,” he said. “I don’t want to send him to prison, even though we don’t like each other. I don’t want to send you to prison.”
He looked straight ahead at Keffe D, longtime rivals from the streets of Compton ignominiously meeting one last time.
“I changed my life. I’m raising my grandkids and telling them never to be like [their] grandfather,” James continued. “You’re asking me questions that could hurt [Davis], and I’m not trying to do that.”
The defense kept prodding James to tell more about the Compton gang war, the hatred between both sides, what really happened on that night in Las Vegas.
“You can’t tell me, as a grown man, what I’m about to do out here,” James said, shaking his head, his old venom returning. Then he pointed at Davis’ lawyer and exclaimed:
“I’m not going to send him to prison. You are!”
* * *
Perhaps the most haunting moments of the trial came from still images. The original medical examiner is dead, so the replacement, Lisa Gavin, examined slides of Shakur’s bloated cadaver with the dispassion of a science teacher dissecting a frog. His corpse was luridly blown up on a projector, streaming live on the Law&Crime YouTube channel, naked and dead. She used a mouse to highlight his non-fatal and fatal wounds. First, the permanent scars that remained from his original shooting at New York’s Quad Studios in ‘94. Then, the fatal bullets that tore through his chest and abdomen, and the fragments that surgeons removed from his intestines.
When a prosecutor asked why the body was so swollen, the pathologist explained that six days of life support left his blood and lymphatic fluids unable to circulate; the vessels seeped into the surrounding tissues. Trickles of blood streamed from his lips and nose. Chest tubes were still attached.
Gavin told the jury about Shakur being unresponsive and unable to breathe, how one of the bullets collapsed his lung, how the doctors were forced to remove it. On the screen, the room glimpsed stitches from the emergency operations, the mold and pus infecting him, the brutal anti-glamour of a homicide victim. No glory. Just the unyielding betrayals of the flesh and the numbing sense that none of this had to happen.
On most trial days, Shakur’s relatives watched from the gallery. Most left during the viewing of the body. A cousin, Zayd Akinyela, remained and told the AP that he wanted to stay for closure. Nonetheless, it made him “very angry, very angry, to say the least, very sad.”
To see Shakur stripped of his vitality seemed like a secondary crime. All the bombast and charisma of the music and the persona were made to feel depressingly small. Only two months before the murder, he had walked the runway at Milan Men’s Fashion Week, the first rapper ever to do so; Gianni Versace was said to have called him the most beautiful man in the world. He was somewhere between rap’s James Dean and Jim Morrison, forever suspended at an empyrean peak, spared the graceless fumbles that await us all with age.
There were never any whispers about Biggie remaining alive. Part of it was the circumstances of his death and the mournful public procession through Brooklyn. But the very nature of Christopher Wallace’s slow-moving, Jovian physique made his body seem like a burden. His existence always seemed provisional; his album titles: Ready to Die, Life After Death. He was 24 when he was murdered, and already walking with a cane.
In contrast, 2Pac was a nuclear missile, the scion of Black Panther royalty, who moved with speed and intensity, ostensibly beholden to none of the rules that restrain the rest of the earthbound. You couldn’t imagine him dead because he seemed like a superhero, coated in adamantium, full of bile, iron, and blood. He demanded that we picture him rolling, and that’s how he’s best remembered. But Newton’s first law has never lost: an object in motion will always stay in motion with the same speed unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
* * *
If there was a point to arresting a grandfather old enough to collect Social Security and trying him three decades later for plotting to kill a beloved icon, it was to provide a reckoning. It was to put an end to the speculation and media exploitation — a long-delayed dose of antibiotics administered to a festering and ancient wound. But the conjecture is a permanent business model.
We prefer exciting “revelations” to dull truths. And after all this time, it’s too anticlimactic for most people to believe that Shakur died in a garden-variety gang murder. Nonetheless, twelve jurors decided that Davis was telling the truth in his admissions to law enforcement. A robbery of a Death Row chain at a Foot Locker led to a melee in a Las Vegas casino, which sparked a revenge plot enacted only a couple hours later. Davis will be sentenced on Oct. 13.
Even some of the most heavily invested in the case don’t seem to entirely believe the conclusion. Last week, Knight called in to TMZ from the RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, where he’s less than halfway through a 28-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter. According to the former CEO of Death Row, defense lawyers offered him a million dollars to take the stand and say that Davis wasn’t in the white Cadillac that night. Sanft denied it, and told reporters that he had taken the case pro bono.
“I feel sort of sad for him. I’m not saying he’s guilty or innocent. That man is on trial fighting for his life. And it’s sad that the police who was involved did what they was supposed to do, for the other people,” Knight said, adding that “crooked cops” and off-duty officers are “1,000 percent” behind 2Pac’s murder. “There was definitely more than one person involved. The people who got their hands in it is trying to muddy the waters.”
If you can untangle what Suge is saying, it sounds like he’s trying to make the case that Keffe D is just a patsy à la Lee Harvey Oswald, an easy decoy to absorb the blame, and deflect from a nefarious plot that would ensnare people at the highest levels of power, should it ever be exposed.
Even 2Pac’s own biological father rejected the court’s decision. On his Facebook page, William Garland wrote that the “prosecutor presented questionable policemen, some corrupt some not…questionable individuals who made money off of the miss representation [sic] of the truth with documentary’s [sic] and books of lies…snitches and gang bangers and that’s all….WHERE’S THE TRUTH WHERE’S JUSTICE? Some say in [sic] died it the hospital that Friday September 13, 1996 and all we have left is theater, speculation, lies, and bullshit welcome to the cover up of a trial that creates more questions than answers Tupac deserves better, his followers and his family deserve better.”
That could be too much to ask for these days. Nonetheless, in the hallway outside of the courtroom, Shakur’s family exchanges hugs, happily shaking their heads that at least some of the darkness and ambiguity surrounding the murder has been lifted. Still in disbelief, they high-five and repeat, “30 years.” One of his cousins nods and says, “those prosecutors went hard to bring the case back!”
On the elevator down to the ground floor, a close friend of Shakur’s family comments, “it feels like a giant knot has been untied.” Several nod their heads in assent. Closure may be impossible, and the full truth of what happened on the night of Sept. 7, 1996 will likely never be known. Even when the system works correctly, we have lost our collective ability to believe in it. But there is finally a verdict.