Almost 28 years after the fact, a Las Vegas TV station is claiming that an arrest is imminent in the 1996 murder of rap icon Tupac Shakur. Despite the fame of the victim and the highly public nature of the crime, Shakur’s murder remains unsolved, partially due to investigators mishandling the case and partially due to the reluctance of witnesses to testify in court. That’s about to change, at least according to Las Vegas ABC affiliate KNTV, which cites an anonymous source who says that the case has been re-opened and authorities are close to arresting a suspect after a man named Duane Keith Davis, a.k.a. Keffe D, gave new information about the murder in an interview for the BET series Death Row Chronicles.
In the documentary, Davis—who says he’s talking because “I have cancer, and I have nothing else to lose”—claims that he was in the front seat of the Cadillac that opened fire on Shakur on September 7, 1996. Davis says the shots came from the back seat of the car, where his nephew Orlando Anderson and another man were sitting at the time. (Davis declined to name the shooter in the interview.) Anderson, who can be seen on surveillance footage in a fight with Shakur and a few other men outside of the MGM Grand Hotel a few hours before the murder, was initially named as a suspect in the case; however, detectives cleared him soon after. Anderson maintained his innocence until his death in 1998.
La Vegas police partially deny KNTV’s report, saying they are reviewing the case but an arrest isn’t imminent in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter: “We are aware of the statements made in a BET interview regarding the Tupac case. As a result of those statements, we have spent the last several months reviewing the case in its entirety. Various reports that an arrest warrant is about to be submitted are inaccurate. This case still remains an open homicide case.”
[additional details via Billboard, Esquire]