he family of Tupac Shakur are “pleased” that a man has been charged with his murder following his 2016 drive-by shooting, a Las Vegas district attorney said.
Duane “Keefe D” Davis, one of the last living witnesses to the drive-by shooting, was arrested on a walk near his home in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson on Friday.
He was then charged by a Nevada grand jury with one count of open murder with use of the deadly weapon with a gang enhancement, according to Clark County Las Vegas district attorney Steve Wolfson.
During a press conference, Mr Wolfson said: “The family has reached out to my office, I imagine also to (police), we’ve been in communication with them.
“We understand that they are welcoming this news, they are pleased with this news and they are certainly aware of the return of this indictment.”
He described Shakur as a “musical legend” before adding: “For a long time, this community and worldwide have been wanting justice for Tupac.
“Today we are taking that first step. Tupac was actually quoted as saying ‘Death is not the greatest loss in life, the greatest loss is what dies inside while still alive’. Never surrender. Well, we didn’t surrender thanks to the great work of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
“This is the indictment we’ve been waiting almost three decades for. It spells out the facts and circumstances and what justifies a Clark County grand jury in returning an indictment and justice will be served.”
Shakur was 25 when he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas Strip on the night of September 7 1996.
A documentary, called Last Man Standing: Suge Knight And The Murders Of Biggie & Tupac, explored the deaths of both rappers, and the life of Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight, who was driving the BMW when Shakur died.
Its director Nick Broomfield told the PA news agency: “It’s weird the police took so long as Keefe D admitted it several years ago.
“He admitted he was in the murder car and gave an interview going into the shooting of Tupac in great detail.”
In 2018, after a cancer diagnosis, Davis said publicly in an interview for a BET show that he was inside the Cadillac – which pulled up next to Shakur – during the attack.
He implicated his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, saying he was one of two people in the back seat where the shots were fired, according to the Associated Press news agency.
Shakur was feuding at the time with rap rival Biggie Smalls, also known as the Notorious B.I.G., who was fatally shot in March 1997.
At the time, both rappers were in the middle of an East Coast-West Coast rivalry that primarily defined the hip-hop scene during the mid-1990s.
