SUSPECT IN SHAKUR SHOOTING APPEARS IN COURT
A self-described gangster who police and prosecutors say masterminded the 1996 shooting death of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas made his first court appearance Wednesday on a murder charge.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 60, stood shackled, wearing a dark-blue jail uniform and plastic orange slippers.
He was scheduled to be arraigned on the charge Wednesday, but the hearing was cut short after he asked Clark County District Judge Tierra Jones to postpone the hearing while he retains counsel in Las Vegas.
Mopreme Shakur, the rapper’s stepbrother, wasn’t in court Wednesday but told The Associated Press that he’s been following developments in the case from his home in Los Angeles, even as he and his family are “trying to manage our expectations.”
“Young Black men often deal with delayed justice because we’re often viewed as the criminals,” he said. “So justice has been delayed for quite some time — in spite of all the eyes, all the attention, despite the celebrity of my brother.”
Davis was arrested Friday near his home in suburban Henderson. A grand jury indictment charged him with murder.
Davis had been a longknown suspect in the case, and publicly admitted his role in the killing in interviews ahead of his 2019 tellall memoir, “Compton Street Legend.”
On the night Shakur was shot, the car he was in was stopped at a red light near the Las Vegas Strip when a white Cadillac pulled up on the passenger side and gunfire erupted.
Davis has said he was in the front passenger seat of the Cadillac and handed a .40-caliber handgun to his nephew in the back seat, from which he said the shots were fired.
In Nevada, a person can be convicted of murder for helping another person commit the crime.