By Brad Brooks
(Reuters) – A former gang member charged in the 1996 murder of hip-hop star Tupac Shakur made his first appearance in a Las Vegas court on Wednesday and was granted a two-week delay to enter a plea.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 60, who police said was long suspected and began implicating himself in a series of public statements in recent years, told Clark County district judge Tierra Jones that his lawyer requested a two-week continuance. Jones granted that request and set his next appearance for Oct. 19.
Davis, who remains in custody without bond, was indicted by a Clark County grand jury last week and arrested in Las Vegas for Shakur’s drive-by shooting death, a long-unsolved crime that became a defining moment in the history of rap music.
Davis was charged with one count of murder with a deadly weapon for his alleged role in leading a group of men to kill Shakur in a drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas strip.
Authorities said David orchestrated a plot to avenge the beating of his nephew, Orlando Anderson, inside the MGM Grand Garden Arena by Shakur and members of his entourage on the night of Sept. 7, 1996, just hours before the shooting.
At a news conference last week police showed hotel security footage of several men kicking and punching a person they identified as Anderson near a bank of elevators before security personnel broke up the altercation.
That incident, police said, led to the retaliatory shooting death of Shakur.
After obtaining a gun from an unnamed associate, Davis, along with Anderson and two other men, Terrence Brown and Deandre Smith, boarded a white Cadillac and rode off to locate the black BMW that was carrying Shakur, police said.
When Davis and the others caught up to Shakur’s vehicle, shots were fired from the Cadillac into the passenger side of the BMW. Shakur, struck four times, died in a hospital six days later at the age of 25.
Authorities have not said who actually fired the gun at Shakur. The three others in the Cadillac with Davis have all since died.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado, Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
