Ex-gang leader's murder trial in Tupac Shakur killing pushed back
LAS VEGAS >> Trial for a former Los Angeles-area gang leader accused of killing of hip-hop music icon Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas in 1996 has been pushed back several months, a judge said Tuesday.
Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny acknowledged that Duane “Keffe D” Davis' lawyer, Carl Arnold, was new to the case and that prosecutors are still providing evidentiary material to the defense. She reset the trial date from June 3 to Nov. 4.
Davis has been jailed on $750,000 bail since his arrest in September, and he expects to be able to raise the 10% needed to obtain a bond to be released to house arrest, Arnold said. Davis told Kierny that people who are willing to help him post bail don't want to appear in court for a “source hearing” to show that the money was legally obtained.
“I've got family that is hesitant to come in here and help me out on the bail because of the media and the simple, yet destructive, process. Toxic chemicals that settle on the seafloor end up in the food chain and work their way up. Eventually, according to the NOAA, “higher-level predators — fish, birds and marine mammals — build up greater and more dangerous amounts of toxic materials than animals lower on the food chain.”
“(Biomagnification) can impact a whole host of animals,” Valentine said. “We're seeing (that) now with California sea lions, with California condors. There's so much DDT that has been dumped off California, that we're seeing effects in those animals.”
Valentine and a team of scientists initially discovered more than 60 barrels on the ocean floor in 2011 and 2013 while exploring the Peninsula seafloor with a remotely operated vehicle.
Since that initial discovery, the research has grown and scientific understanding has become more complex.
In 2021, for example, survey researchers from UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography discovered approximately 27,000 barrels on the ocean floor. They, like Valetine, initially thought the barrels potentially contained DDT. The insecticide, which has been banned for years, had been legally dumped by a local company, the now-defunct Montrose Chemical Corp., for decades.
But in January, Scripps discovered that those barrels circus that's going on,” Davis said.
Davis, 60, is originally from Compton. He is the only person still alive who was in a car from which shots were fired in September 1996, killing were mostly discarded World War II-era military munitions. A whale graveyard was also found.
The Scripps survey mapped 135 square miles of the San Pedro Basin, about halfway between the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Catalina Island. The technology that allows ocean-floor mapping has advanced so much in just a few year that scientists could now distinguish between barrels and munitions.
But just because those barrels did not contain DDT does not mean the insecticide wasn't present off the Peninsula. Rather, scientists discovered in 2022 that until regulations curtailed the practice, DDT had been directly dumped into the ocean for years.
“Substantial amounts of DDT remain in these sediments, which are largely unaltered after more than 70 years,” according to today's journal article, titled “Disentangling the History of Deep Ocean Disposal for DDT and other Industrial Waste off Southern California.”
Valentine is a corresponding author of the article. Other scientists from UC Santa Barbara, Oleolytics LLC, USC's Earth science department and elsewhere also contributed to the article.
The Environmental Protection Agency, according to the article, discovered 15 offshore dump sites for disposing “radioactive wastes, refinery and oil drilling wastes, chemical wastes,
TAttorney Carl Arnold, representing Duane “Keffe D” Davis, addresses the media after Davis' status hearing at the Regional Justice Center, on Tuesday in Las Vegas. A trial date has been pushed back from June to November for the former Los Angeles-area gang leader charged with killing hip-hop music icon Tupac Shakur in 1996 in Las Vegas. Shakur and wounding rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight in another car at a traffic signal near the Las Vegas Strip. Knight, now 58, is serving 28 years in a California prison for an unrelated
Scientists on the vessel Falkor conduct research on a DDT dumpsite off the coast of Los Angeles where barrels of chemicals were dumped from 1947-1982. The science team used a remotely operated vehicle to collect data that will be used to add to the assessment on how this stretch of deep sea is responding to DDT. military munitions, filter cakes, and refuse.”
Montrose had legally dumped DDT from 1948 to around 1961, according to the article.
Montrose contracted with the California Salvage Co. to dispose of the “strong acid waste offshore and discharge it into the ocean” by barge, the article said.
“Located immediately offshore from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach,” the article said, “the San Pedro Basin received substantial input of these wastes leading to high DDT concentrations recorded in select sediment samples.”
Montrose, based near Torrance, built an acid recycling plant, which began the decline of Cal Salvage waste dumping for the chemical company.
“There was no record of ocean disposal of Montrose sulfuric acid wastes after 1961,” the article said, “the same year Cal Salvage's operation became regulated by a regional water quality board and a formal dumpsite was assigned to them.”
But Cal Salvage, the article said, continued dumping industrial waste for other clients. Montrose reportedly disposed of 1.5 million gallons of other industrial wastes from 1965 to 1972.
Cal Salvage, meanwhile, continued ocean disposal until the mid 1970s, when permitting was not allowed, Valentine said.
No samples of the barrels on the seafloor provide evidence fatal shooting in the Los Angeles area in 2015.
Arnold told reporters outside the courtroom that he believed Davis may be able this week to finish raising the $75,000 to obtain a bail bond and be freed to house arrest with electronic monitoring. A source hearing could take place within 30 days, he said.
Davis was arrested outside his home in suburban Henderson. He pleaded not guilty in November to firstdegree murder and has remained jailed at the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Prosecutors say they have strong evidence that Davis incriminated himself during police and media interviews since 2008, and in his own 2019 tell-all memoir of life leading a Compton street gang.
Arnold on Tuesday echoed comments by Davis' previous
of radioactive waste disposal, the article said, but there is circumstantial evidence that such dumping may have occurred — and doing so may not have run afoul of the law.
“The historical record,” the article said, “points to a scenario in which Cal Salvage was potentially able to openly operate as an offshore radioactive waste disposal company without triggering oversight.”
The trail, though, is cold, Valentine said.
“I don't actually know when, as a corporation, it dissolved,” Valentine said of Cal Salvage, “or how they were even set up.”
But there is evidence in the sediments that the peak of offshore disposal was the mid-1950s. The evidence, though, also includes fallout from nuclear weapons testing.
There was a “low level fallout of certain radioisotopes all over the planet” from when nuclear testing was conducted above ground by the United States and the Soviet Union.
Researchers, Valentine said, compared the peak concentration of DDT and the amount of radioisotopes to determine when the bulk of DDT was dumped. Carbon-14 dating was also a component used in the dating.
“It was a lot of detonations that released these nuclear products directly into the atmosphere,” Valentine said. “And they then spread on winds as small particles until they settled out. And they settled out all over the planet.”
Radioactive waste, though, does not have the same impact on the environment, Valentine said, since there is “no concentrating effect” like with DDT and the isotopes of the radioactive waste “would have decayed away.”
“There was this offshore disposal of the DDT and that remains largely as DDT today,” Valentine said, “and it's buried down 2 to 21/2 inches beneath the seafloor.”
There are also derivatives of DDT that have broken down and can still be found attorneys, telling reporters that Davis wrote the book to make money, as others including a police investigator had done. He also noted that police and prosecutors do not have a murder weapon or the car from which shots were fired. He said the state will have to prove that Davis was in Las Vegas the night Shakur was shot.
Davis wrote that he was promised immunity from prosecution in 2010 when he told authorities in Los Angeles what he knew about the fatal shootings of Shakur and rival rapper Christopher Wallace six months later in Los Angeles. Wallace was known as The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls.
Shakur had five No. 1 albums, was nominated for six Grammy Awards and was inducted in 2017 into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He received a posthumous star last year on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
closer to the surface of the seafloor, Valentine said.
DDT has had a significant impact on wildlife, Valentine said, including on the bald eagle.
The bald eagle effectively disappeared from Catalina Island in the 1950s, Valentine said, in large part because of DDT, even though “we don't have direct evidence for it.”
There was abundant DDT that was “dumped into the surface water, into the ecosystem” where the bald eagle got its food, he said.
DDT, he said, is “well known for its properties of eggshell thinning.”
The bald eagle has since been reintroduced to the island.
Studies still need to be done on the World War II munitions that were recently found, Valentine said.
“I'm not aware of of anything in them that would have the kind of effects that DDT would,” he said, “but I think it's still worth looking into.”
That's why U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Salud Carbajal, along with 20 other California lawmakers, said in a news release this week that they are urging the Office of Management and Budget to include “robust, long-term funding” to research DDT and other harmful chemicals dumped into the ocean, as well as the impact on the Southern California environment and human and wildlife health.
The late Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and Padilla helped secure nearly $12 million over two fiscal years, 2022 and 2023, to help survey Southern California DDT dumpsites, according to the news release.
“While DDT was banned more than 50 years ago, we still have only a murky picture of its potential impacts to human health, national security and ocean ecosystems,” the lawmakers said in the release. “We encourage the administration to think about the next 50 years, creating a long-term national plan within EPA and NOAA to address this toxic legacy off the coast of our communities.”