More than 27 years after a drive-by shooting killed hip-hop star Tupac Shakur, an artist with metro Atlanta ties, Las Vegas police have made an arrest, The Associated Press reported.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis was arrested early Friday morning. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that a grand jury indicted Davis on a charge of murder with a deadly weapon.
In 2005, Shakur’s mother, Afeni Shakur-Davis, opened the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation Center for the Arts on Memorial Drive in DeKalb County, an institution she hoped would include a performing arts theater, museum, art gallery, community meeting space and classrooms. The center has since closed and is not open to the public.
“All Eyez On Me,” a biopic about Shakur completed filming in metro Atlanta in 2016, the year Shakur-Davis died.
The arrest in his death comes two months after police raided the home of Davis’s wife, the AP reported. Documents said police were looking for items “concerning the murder of Tupac Shakur,” according to the report. Davis is no stranger to investigators and admitted in interviews and his 2019 memoir that he was in the white Cadillac when shots were fired on Sept. 7, 1996. Shakur, who died a week later, was 25.
Now 60, Davis is a self-described “gangster” and the uncle of one of Shakur’s known rivals who was seen as a suspect early on in the police investigation. Orlando Anderson, the late nephew of Davis, was also in the Cadillac and had reportedly feuded with Shakur earlier in the day.
Shakur-Davis was heralded in her son’s 1995 hit “Dear Mama.” Long after the shooting she vowed to keep her son’s memory alive, and gave the Atlanta University Center Woodruff Library an archive of his original handwritten manuscripts, writings from his diary, song lyrics and other personal items.
In 2011, a benefit concert was held in Atlanta on what would’ve been Shakur’s 40th birthday. The concert featured Erykah Badu, Roy Ayers, Too Short and others.
Earlier this year, Shakur got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In July, the gold, ruby and diamond crown ring Tupac Shakur wore at his last public appearance sold for more than $1 million at Sotheby’s auction house.
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