Formerly cold case returns to intense scrutiny
The trial of Duane “Keffe D” Davis in the 1996 fatal shooting of Tupac Shakur begins Monday in Las Vegas, nearly three decades after the rapper was fatally shot at age 25 on Sept. 7, 1996.
Starting Monday, the September 1996 shooting will come under intense scrutiny again as Davis, 63, is tried in Shakur’s killing. Many fans and followers of the formerly cold case thought the moment might never come.
When Shakur was fatally shot, the presidential race between incumbent Bill Clinton and Bob Dole was in its stretch run. The Atlanta Olympics had just ended, and the internet was in its infancy.
In a booming music business where CDs were king, Shakur’s monumental “All Eyez on Me” had topped the Billboard album chart a few months earlier. The album marked the pinnacle of a brief hip-hop career whose legend would only grow in the following decades.
His shooting was one of several momentous mid-1990s musical deaths, including those of Kurt Cobain and Shakur’s archrival, the Notorious B.I.G.
MSI previously reported that jury selection opened in Las Vegas for Davis’s trial and that a judge ruled a 2008 Davis police interview admissible at trial, the steps that carried the formerly cold case to its trial.