On September 7, 1996, at 11:15 p.m. (PDT), Tupac Shakur, a 25-year-old American rapper, was shot in a drive-by shooting in Paradise, Nevada. The shooting happened when his car was stopped at a red light on East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane. Shakur was hit by four bullets fired from a .40-caliber Glock 22 pistol: two in the chest, one in the arm, and one in the thigh. The driver, Suge Knight, was slightly hit by a bullet during the shooting. Shakur died from his injuries six days later, on September 13, 1996.
Orlando Anderson, a member of the Crips gang, was suspected of committing the murder but denied being involved and was never charged. He was killed in a separate gang-related shooting in 1998. On September 29, 2023, 27 years after Shakur’s murder, Duane "Keefe D" Davis, Anderson’s uncle, was arrested after being indicted by a grand jury for the first-degree murder of Shakur.
Prior events
Tupac Shakur went to a boxing match between Bruce Seldon and Mike Tyson with Suge Knight, who was the leader of Death Row Records. The event took place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. After the match, Trevon "Tre" Lane, an associate of Suge Knight and a member of the Mob Pirus gang from Compton, California, saw Orlando Anderson, a member of the rival South Side Compton Crips gang, in the MGM Grand lobby. Earlier in July 1996, Anderson and others from the South Side Crips tried to steal Lane’s Death Row medallion at a Foot Locker store in the Lakewood Center mall in Lakewood, California.
Lane told Tupac about the encounter, and Tupac confronted Anderson in the lobby. Tupac asked Anderson if he was from the "South" (South Side Crips) and hit him in the face, causing him to fall. Tupac and members of Knight’s group then helped attack Anderson. The fight was recorded by the MGM Grand’s surveillance cameras and was stopped by hotel security.
After the fight, Tupac returned to his hotel, the Luxor Las Vegas. He told his girlfriend, Kidada Jones, about his role in the fight, even though he had earlier promised to return to her after entering the MGM Grand and had her wait in a vehicle. Tupac left with Knight in a BMW sedan, changed clothes, and went to Club 662, which Knight owned, to perform at a charity concert. Minutes before the shooting, Tupac’s friend Leonard Jefferson took a well-known photo of him (one of the last known photos of Tupac) in the car with Knight.
Shooting
At 11:00–11:05 p.m. (PDT), Shakur and Knight were stopped on Las Vegas Boulevard by officers from the LVMPD Bike Patrol for playing the car stereo too loudly and not having license plates. The license plates were found in the trunk of Knight’s car. The group was released a few minutes later without being cited. At 11:10 p.m., while they were stopped at a red light near the Maxim Hotel on East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, a vehicle with two women pulled up on their left side. Shakur, who was speaking through the window of a 1996 BMW 750iL owned by Death Row, exchanged words with the women and invited them to go to Club 662.
At 11:15 p.m., a white, four-door, late-model Cadillac pulled up to Knight’s right side. The shooter, sitting in the back of the Cadillac, rolled down the window and quickly fired gunshots from a .40 S&W Glock 22 at Shakur’s BMW. Shakur was hit four times: twice in the chest, once in the arm, and once in the thigh. One bullet entered Shakur’s right lung. Knight was hit in the head by pieces of something.
Shakur’s bodyguard, Frank Alexander, said that when he was about to ride with Shakur in Knight’s car, Shakur asked him to drive Jones’s car instead, in case they needed more vehicles from Club 662 back to their hotel. Alexander reported in his documentary, Before I Wake, that shortly after the shooting, one of the group’s cars followed the attacker, but he never heard from the people in the car. Yaki Kadafi, who was in a car behind Shakur with bodyguards, and others from the Death Row group refused to help the police.
Despite Knight’s injuries and a flat tire on his car, he drove Shakur and himself about a mile to Las Vegas Boulevard and Harmon Avenue. They were stopped again by the Bike Patrol, who called for paramedics using a radio. After arriving, police and paramedics took Knight and Shakur to the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. They were stopped near the MGM Grand, where their evening had started. Gobi Rahimi, a Death Row music video director who visited Shakur at the hospital, later said a Death Row marketing employee told him the shooters had called the record label and threatened Shakur. Gobi told Las Vegas police, but they said they were too busy to help. No attackers came to the hospital. Shakur said he was dying while being carried into the emergency room.
Aftermath
At the hospital, Shakur was connected to life support machines and placed in a medically-induced coma after repeatedly trying to leave his bed. Jones visited him and played Don McLean's song "Vincent" on a CD player near his bed. Jones said Shakur moaned and had "eyes filled with mucus and swollen." She told Shakur she loved him. Knight was released from the hospital the day after the shooting on September 8 but did not speak until September 11. He told officers he "heard something, but saw nothing" during the shooting. A police representative said Knight’s statement did not help the investigation. At the time of Shakur’s hospitalization, officers reported having no leads. Sgt. Kevin Manning stated that officers received "a whole lot of cooperation" from Shakur’s support group.
Rahimi and members of Shakur’s group, Outlawz, guarded him in the hospital because they feared the shooter might return to harm him. Rahimi suggested that Outlawz members might have brought weapons with them. On the afternoon of Friday, September 13, 1996, Shakur died in the critical care unit due to respiratory failure, which caused cardiac arrest after his right lung was removed. He was declared dead at 4:03 p.m. Doctors tried to revive him but could not stop the heavy bleeding. His mother, Afeni Shakur, decided to stop medical treatment.
In 2014, a police officer who claimed to witness Shakur’s final moments said Shakur refused to name the person who shot him. When the officer asked if Shakur saw the shooter, Shakur responded with "Fuck you" as his last words. However, paramedics, other officers, and those present at the scene, including Knight and Alexander, did not report hearing Shakur say those words.
Crips-Bloods Conflict
On September 9, 1996, after the shooting of Shakur, a gang war began in Compton between the South Side Compton Crips and Mob Piru Bloods. This conflict caused 12 shootings and 3 deaths. Robert Ladd, a former detective from Compton, called the events "10 Days of Hell." Orlando Anderson's close friend, BG Knocc Out, said Anderson was shot in the legs with an AK-47 during the conflict and used a wheelchair for a time.
On October 2, 300 police officers raided homes of known gang members in areas like Compton. The operation aimed to stop the violence and allowed Compton police to arrest Orlando.
Investigative reports on the murder
One year after Tupac Shakur was shot, Sgt. Kevin Manning, who led the investigation, told reporter Cathy Scott from Las Vegas Sun that the murder "may never be solved." Manning explained that the case moved slowly because few new clues were found, and witnesses stayed quiet. He said the investigation had no progress. E.D.I. Mean, a friend of Shakur and a member of the group Outlawz, said he believed law enforcement knew "what happened" and added, "This is America. We found bin Laden."
In 2002, Los Angeles Times reporter Chuck Philips published a two-part article titled "Who Killed Tupac Shakur?" after a year of research. Philips wrote that the shooting was carried out by a Compton gang called the South Side Crips to punish Shakur for beating one of its members, Orlando Anderson, earlier that day. Anderson fired the fatal shots. Las Vegas police considered Anderson a suspect and briefly interviewed him once. Anderson was killed nearly two years later in a separate gang-related incident. Philips also said that East Coast rappers, including The Notorious B.I.G., who were Tupac's rivals, and some New York City criminals were involved.
The second article in Philips' series discussed how Las Vegas police handled the investigation poorly. It listed these problems: (1) ignoring a fight that happened hours before the shooting, in which Shakur beat Anderson in the MGM Grand lobby; (2) failing to follow up with a member of Shakur's group who saw the shooting and could have identified the attackers, but this person was killed before being questioned; and (3) not pursuing a lead from a witness who saw a white Cadillac similar to the car used by the shooters.
In 2011, Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reported that the FBI released documents after a Freedom of Information Act request. These documents showed the FBI investigated the Jewish Defense League for demanding money from Shakur and other rappers after threatening them. In 2017, Knight claimed he might have been the target of the attack that killed Shakur, suggesting it was a planned attack to take control of Death Row Records.
Witnesses
At the time of the shooting, a group of about ten cars was following Knight and Shakur's vehicle. The year after the shooting, Knight told an ABC Primetime Live interviewer that he did not know who had shot Shakur but said he would not tell police if he did. Yaki Kadafi was involved in a fight with officers two days after the shooting when they pulled over a motorist he knew. He protested and left Las Vegas shortly after Shakur's death. He traveled to Atlanta and Los Angeles before moving to New Jersey, where his family lived. During this time, Compton investigators created photos of several gang members, including Anderson, and sent them directly to Las Vegas. Manning said detectives contacted Kadafi's lawyer to arrange a meeting with the rapper so he could see the photos. However, the calls were not answered. Police did not try to find Kadafi, who was killed in a housing project in Irvington, New Jersey, in November 1996, two months after Shakur's shooting.
In early 1997, E.D.I Mean and Alexander told the Times that they had never been asked by Las Vegas police to look at photos of possible suspects in the case, even though they had seen the shooting and had seen the men in the car from which the shots were fired. During a March 19, 1997, police interview, Alexander was shown eight sets of photos but could not identify any suspects. Mean said he saw all four men in the vehicle, while Alexander said he saw the face of the person who shot Shakur. Alexander also said he only saw the people in the car from the side. Las Vegas police disagreed with the pair's description of what they had told officers the night of the shooting.
In a 2018 documentary called Unsolved on USA Network, Duane "Keefe D" Davis, a Crips gang leader in California and Anderson's uncle, said he was in the car with Tupac's killer when the shots were fired. He refused to name the shooter, citing "street code." He said the car was driven by Terrence "T-Brown" Brown and that Anderson and DeAndrae "Dre" Smith were in the backseat. All of these people were members of the South Side Compton Crips and are now deceased. He also said the shooter was in the backseat. In 2016, James "Mob James" McDonald, a former Death Row bodyguard, said he saw Anderson and other South Side Crips near Club 662 in a white Cadillac before the shooting of Suge's BMW. According to Radar Online, Keefe D said they went to a Liquor Barn store after waiting near Club 662 and then traveled to The Carriage House hotel. On the way, they saw the Death Row caravan.
Arrest and trial of Duane Davis
On July 18, 2023, the Las Vegas Police Department carried out a search warrant related to the investigation into the murder of Shakur. The search took place at a home in Henderson, Nevada, and was part of the ongoing inquiry into Shakur’s death. It was later confirmed that the home belonged to the wife of Duane "Keefe D" Davis. Davis was arrested on September 29, 2023, in connection with the murder of Tupac Shakur. He was not allowed to post bail and was charged with murder. On November 2, 2023, Davis said he was not guilty during a court hearing in Las Vegas.
On November 7, 2023, Judge Carli Kierny of the Clark County District Court set a trial date for Davis to begin on June 3, 2024. On January 9, 2024, during a court update, Davis was granted $750,000 bail and allowed to stay at home under house arrest. A second court update on February 20, 2024, resulted in the trial being postponed to November 4, 2024. Despite being granted bail and house arrest, Davis remained in custody at the Clark County Detention Center. During a grand jury hearing, a member of the South Side Compton Crips gang testified that DeAndrae Smith, not Orlando Anderson, was the person who shot Tupac Shakur. The witness explained:
When [Davis] gave the gun to Orlando, Orlando could not see the target clearly. Big Dre is very tall, about six feet six inches, and weighs around 370 to 400 pounds. It would be difficult to reach over someone of his size while shooting, as bullets might have hit Big Dre directly. He is too large to bend down or move easily.
On February 18, 2025, the trial was postponed again to February 9, 2026. On August 5, 2025, Davis decided to change his defense attorney for the murder trial. As of September 2025, Davis remained in custody at Clark County Detention Center. On November 18, 2025, the trial was delayed once more, this time to August 10, 2026. At that time, it was reported that Davis was now being held at Nevada’s High Desert State Prison, where he is serving time for a separate jailhouse fight conviction.
On April 9, 2025, a jury found Davis guilty of one count of battery by a prisoner and one count of challenging a fight in a separate case. On July 2, 2025, a request for a new trial in this case was denied. Although this case was unrelated to Tupac Shakur’s murder, the hearing highlighted the public attention surrounding Davis and his upcoming murder trial. Originally scheduled for August 7, 2025, Davis’s sentencing in the jailhouse fight case was delayed after he changed attorneys for the murder trial. On September 3, 2025, Davis was sentenced to 16 to 40 months in prison for the jailhouse fight conviction, with credit for over seven months of time already served. By November 2025, it was reported that Davis, who had been in Clark County Detention Center at the time of his September 2025 conviction, was now serving his sentence at Nevada’s High Desert State Prison.
Speculated link with Sean Combs
In October 2024, news came out that the family of Tupac Shakur hired an investigator to check if his murder was connected to Sean "Diddy" Combs, who started Bad Boy Records. Former LAPD detective Greg Kading and journalist Chuck Philips said the Southside Crips were offered $1 million to kill Tupac Shakur and another person named Knight. However, their stories differ: Kading said Sean Combs offered the money, while Philips said The Notorious B.I.G. offered it. There was also a rumor in the mid-1990s, after Tupac's death, that Diddy offered a smaller bounty of $10,000 to $75,000 on Death Row chains, as claimed by Tupac's friend Danny Boy.
At the same time, a lawsuit was filed against Combs, claiming he raped a woman in 2018 using a remote control after she suggested he was involved in Tupac's murder.