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Jurors on Thursday heard Duane (Keffe D) Davis tell detectives in an audio recording of a 2008 police interview that his nephew Orlando (Baby Lane) Anderson fired the shots that killed rapper Tupac Shakur.
Davis, who said in the interview with Los Angeles police that he was also in the car with Anderson, is accused of orchestrating the 1996 killing of the 25-year-old hip-hop superstar in Las Vegas.
At the time of the interview, his nephew had been dead for a decade.
Davis said on the recording that the white Cadillac he and Anderson were riding in with two other men pulled up alongside a car with Shakur inside, along with hip-hop mogul and Death Row Records head Marion (Suge) Knight.
“If we would have been on my side, I would have blasted,” Davis says on the audio that was played for jurors Thursday.
But Knight’s car was on the other side, Davis said, so he passed his gun back to Deandre “Big Dre” Smith. But Smith didn’t want it, Davis said.
Anderson, who was also in the back seat, took the weapon and started firing, Davis said.
Jurors watched a screen as the transcript of the audio recording rolled. Some occasionally took notes. As the audio interview began playing, Davis and his attorney whispered to each other in the courtroom. Shakur’s family sat still, occasionally looking at the screen or looking down to the floor. The room was quiet as the audio of Davis describing the shooting played.
It was the first time Davis directly discussed his involvement in the killing with authorities. The interview is essential evidence in the state’s case against the 63-year-old Davis. Prosecutors told jurors in opening statements that they would lean heavily on Davis’s own admissions in interviews with police and on podcasts, as well as the 2019 memoir he co-authored, Compton Street Legend.
He also previously told the FBI that his nephew was not involved in the 1996 shooting of Shakur and speculated that Knight or Sean (Diddy) Combs were involved.
Client ‘full of crap,’ lawyer says
Davis has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer has called the prosecution’s narrative “fiction” and said Davis was “full of crap” when he told stories of his involvement and that authorities knew it. He argued investigators failed to back up the statements his client made with evidence.
The Los Angeles police detectives had actually brought Davis in to talk about the 1997 shooting death of Shakur’s arch-rival, the Notorious B.I.G.
Davis had briefly been one of the suspects in that still unsolved killing, but he was later discounted.
“Everybody was a suspect at that time,” Daryn Dupree, one of the detectives in the interview, said in court testimony Thursday.
On the audio recording played in court, detectives are heard telling Davis that their discussion is confidential.
“Nothing you say today can be used against you,” says Greg Kading, the other detective conducting the interview who described it in a book a few years later.
Some in the audience shook their heads when someone in the audio was heard telling Davis that “nothing leaves this room.”
Dupree is heard saying, “If you don’t say nothing, it’s cool, but if you go out there and start talking…”
Confidentiality no longer applies, prosecutors argue
Prosecutors say Davis did, in fact, “go out there and start talking” a decade later when he told stories about the shooting in interviews and the memoir. They said that nullifies any agreement he had with law enforcement over this and other recorded conversations.
Prosecutors allege Shakur was killed to avenge Shakur’s entourage attacking Davis’s nephew Anderson a few hours earlier at the MGM Grand after a Mike Tyson fight. Davis was at the fight but not the brawl.
Later in the evening, they were in the Cadillac and saw Shakur hanging out of a black BMW with people calling out “Tupac!” according to Davis’s account in Compton Street Legend.
Davis told the detectives that after Lane fired the shots, he thought Knight was dead.
Decades after his death, Shakur remains a cultural icon and one of the most influential and versatile rappers of all time. He died as his popularity was peaking and his acting career was taking off. His legend has only grown in the years since.
