Opening statements begin at Tupac Shakur murder trial

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, is charged with murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang in Shakur’s death.

He pleaded not guilty, but if convicted faces life in prison.

Davis entered the courtroom in Las Vegas in a blue suit and tie and scanned the audience to see who was there before sitting next to his lawyer Michael Sanft once the jury was sworn in and seated.

Members of Shakur’s family, including his stepbrother Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur, sat quietly in the front row of the courtroom behind prosecutors.

Chief deputy district attorney Binu Palal showed jurors a picture of the Mike Tyson fight with the date “September 7, 1996” and showed video of Shakur’s entourage attacking Davis’s nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.

“Let’s be clear, Duane Davis did not pull the trigger. But he did plan the shooting in retaliation of the beating of his nephew,” Mr Palal said.

“Remarkably, you will learn that from Duane Davis himself.”

Davis spent the next two hours planning how to get even, said Mr Palal, and Shakur was gunned down “in an act of revenge”.

The long-unsolved drive-by shooting gripped the hip-hop community, partly because no-one was charged until Davis was indicted in 2023.

Shakur is considered one of the most influential and versatile rappers of all time, despite dying at 25.

He was nominated for six Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.

In recent years, he received a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, had a street in Oakland named in his honour and inspired a character in the upcoming video game Stranger Than Heaven.

A few fans lined up early on Monday for a coveted seat in the courthouse to watch the first day of evidence.

Din Malone took a bus from Denver and hopes to stay for the entire trial.

“As a brother and a fan, I felt like he talked through his music,” said Mr Malone, who wore a Tupac shirt and played Shakur’s music from his phone while waiting to get inside.

Over the course of the trial, which could span weeks, prosecutors plan to call 35 to 45 potential witnesses, and the defence will call only a handful to give evidence.

Maurice Shakur recently told The Associated Press that sitting through the trial will be retraumatising for the family, but it is important to be there.

“We’re gonna stand by Pac as we always have,” he said.

Along with Shakur’s family, friends and fans travelled to Las Vegas to show their support during jury selection.

Darryl Harper, a veteran music producer who collaborated with Shakur at Death Row Records on songs released after the 1996 shooting, said he booked a plane ticket as soon as the latest trial date was set.

“He became a personal friend of mine as I worked with him almost every day of his last days here,” said Mr Harper, who flew in from his home in Georgia.

Shakur’s cousins Kendrick Lesane and William Lesane flew in from Atlanta last week.

William Lesane said he wants someone held accountable.

“For me, justice has long left the station 30 years ago,” he said.

The gunfire that killed Shakur came from a white Cadillac that Davis was riding in with three others, all of whom have since died.

In 2008, Davis spoke to investigators looking into the deaths of Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., born Christopher Wallace.

Davis instead talked about the Shakur shooting. He described handing a gun to the men in the back seat of a white Cadillac that fired on a black BMW with Shakur and Marion “Suge” Knight inside.

During the investigation, Davis was under an agreement that what he said about Shakur’s killing could not be used against him.

But nearly 10 years later, Davis published a book with those details and participated in media interviews in which he laid out his role in the shooting.

The book and his public statements revived the Las Vegas investigation and became key pieces of evidence, prosecutors say.

“Had he decided to never write the book, he would not, probably, have ever been prosecuted for the crime,” prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo recently said.

Mr Sanft says Davis co-authored the book Compton Street Legend to make money, not to tell the truth.

He argues it is impossible to tell which parts – if any – Davis wrote and which parts author Yusuf Jah penned.

Mr Jah, who is on the list of potential witnesses, recently told an investigator he did not believe Davis fully read his own book, according to court documents.

Prosecutors say the book is sensationalised but that they will show “what is true, what is exaggeration, and what is an outright lie”, they wrote in court documents.

Davis recently told Las Vegas television station Fox 5 that he actually was not there the night Shakur was shot.

In his book though, he says he carpooled from Los Angeles to Las Vegas that night to watch the same boxing match Shakur attended.

It describes where he stayed and the events before and after Shakur was shot.

Retired Las Vegas police officer Garry Dale was the first of the 35 to 45 witnesses the prosecution plans to call at the trial expected to last about a month.

He recounted how he and another officer stopped a car carrying Knight and Shakur because the vehicle did not have a licence plate. They let the two go with a warning.

About 10 minutes later the two officers responded to a call about a shooting and found Shakur being pulled from the car by emergency services, Mr Dale said. Knight had been grazed by bullets, but told the officers to take care of Shakur, he said.

Mr Dale jumped in the ambulance and tried to get Shakur to tell him who shot him. The retired officer said that Shakur said something like “no, we’ll take care of it”.

Another witness, Ingrid Stokes, gave evidence that she and her friends were heading home from Las Vegas when they encountered Shakur and Mr Knight, who was friends with a woman in Ms Stokes’ group.

Mr Knight invited them to a nightclub, she said, and they decided to meet them there.

The car Ms Stokes was a passenger in was one lane over and a car length ahead of Mr Knight’s vehicle, when they heard gunshots while stopped at an intersection, she said.

Ms Stokes said they feared more gunfire and drove away, almost hitting a white four-door vehicle in the process.

When they returned to the scene, police treated them like suspects, she said, and made them sit on the sidewalks. She was scared to talk about the case, worried about poor treatment from law enforcement and the potential for retribution from the unknown shooter.

“Snitches get stitches,” she said.

Brent Becker, a former Las Vegas homicide detective, gave evidence that Mr Knight showed up to a police interview with lawyers, which Mr Becker and other law enforcement officers thought was weird because Mr Knight was a victim. Mr Knight was timid, and his interview was practised, Mr Becker said.

“It was not the ‘Suge’ Knight I expected,” the detective said

Mr Knight told investigators that he did not know anything.

“I thought he lied to us,” Mr Becker said.

Mr Becker described the difficulty of getting witnesses to talk. The four names of the people inside the Cadillac that investigators “were leaning on” were Davis, Mr Anderson, Deandrae “Freaky” Smith and Terry “Bubble Up” Brown, the detective said. But he noted he had no living witnesses to tell him who was in the Cadillac.