Court hears suspect Duane 'Keffe D' Davis name alleged Tupac shooter

Jurors heard an audio recording of Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis telling cops who he claimed was responsible for killing Tupac Shakur.

The trial for the September 1996 killing of Shakur entered its fourth day on Thursday (20 August), with jurors hearing evidence from a 2008 interview between suspect Davis and investigators working on the case.

In the recording, which was played in court alongside a transcript, Davis told officers his nephew Orlando ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson had fired the shots that killed Shakur.

At the time of the 2008 interview, Anderson had been dead for a decade.

Davis said the white Cadillac he and Anderson were riding in alongside two other men, both of whom has since died, pulled up alongside a car with Shakur and hip-hop mogul Marion ‘Suge’ Knight inside.

The jury heard of a recording of Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis from a 2008 interview (JOHN LOCHER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

“If we would have been on my side, I would have blasted,” Davis admitted in the recording.

However, Knight’s car was on the other side, so Davis allegedly passed his gun back to Deandre ‘Big Dre’ Smith, but Smith did not want it, Davis said.

According to Davis, Anderson, who was in the back seat, took the weapon and started firing.

In the interview, Davis was then asked: “So Orland shot across Dre?”

To which he replied: "He leaned over on the window, we rolled down the window and pop.”

The interview is essential evidence in the state’s case against the 63-year-old.

It was the first time Davis has directly discussed his involvement in the killing with authorities.

Prosecutors told jurors in opening statements that they would lean heavily on Davis’ own admissions in interviews with police and on podcasts, as well as the 2019 memoir he co-authored, Compton Street Legend.

Tupac was fatally shot in 1996 (Bob Berg/Getty Images)

Davis has pleaded not guilty and his defence team has argued the case against him is ‘fiction’ and took the unusual move of telling the jury his client was known to ‘bulls**t’.

He argued investigators failed to back up the statements his client made with evidence.

After hearing the recording, the jury were then dismissed and will return tomorrow to hear more testimony in the trial that is set to run for weeks.

The jury has already heard what Shakur told a cop after being shot, and have set through grim testimony detailing the rapper’s injuries following the shooting.

The case has garnered an immense amount of interest, largely because no-one was charged until Davis was indicted in 2023.

And also because the victim in the case is a hip-hop icon.

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.