30 years later: The murder trial of Tupac Shakur begins
Three decades ago, Tupac was shot to death near Las Vegas. Even now, 30 years later, people who were at the scene of the murder are taking the witness stand — and refusing to tell what happened there. All the reports from the murder trial that shocked the United States.
The murder trial of Tupac Shakur opened in Las Vegas, almost 30 years after the shooting that killed the 25-year-old rapper, and the local prosecution is presenting for the first time an official and detailed version of the murder. According to a report in the Guardian, the defendant is 63-year-old Duane "Keffe D" Davis, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips gang, whom the prosecution describes as the field commander of the effort to kill Tupac. Davis pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers are trying to convince the jury that the things he wrote in his 2019 memoir and said in other interviews were lies intended to create noise.
"I think we've been waiting 30 years to mourn properly," said Yaid Akinyila, Shakur's cousin, to the AP agency outside the courtroom.
On the second day of the trial, autopsy photos of Shakur's body were shown to the jury, alongside shell casings found on the street and security footage from the brawl at the MGM Grand hotel involving Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, Davis's nephew — a brawl that allegedly led to the shooting. The courtroom, which was nearly full, went silent as the jurors looked at the photos, and some family members walked out or looked away.
Akinyila chose to stay in the room, even when the evidence was hard to watch. "The details, especially for people who were close to him, really help me in the grieving process," he said. "A lot of people can't grieve until they understand what happened to the person they loved and how it happened." According to him, he did not know until that moment how many times his cousin had been shot.
At the same time, the case is still dragging behind the same problem that has accompanied it since 1996: people who were around refuse to talk to law enforcement authorities about who was involved in the murder. James McDonald, a former associate of Marion "Suge" Knight — the founder of Death Row Records who was sitting in the car with Shakur at the time of the shooting — made it clear to the lawyers at the very beginning of his testimony: "You better treat me as a hostile witness."
"It's not right that I, or anyone else, should raise the dead," McDonald said in court, emphasizing that he only came because he received a subpoena. — "I know a lot of things, things that happened. People haven't talked about this for 30 years. Today is not the day."
At one point, while apparently pointing toward Davis, who was sitting directly behind his lawyer, he added: "I don't want to send you to prison, even though we don't like each other." During cross-examination, McDonald also attacked Davis's lawyer, Michael Snepp, telling him: "You're asking something that's going to hurt this guy."
"I changed my life," said McDonald. "I'm raising my grandchildren, teaching them not to be like their grandfather, and here I am, explaining to people what I used to be. And I'm not proud of it, I'm not proud of it at all." Almost 30 years after the murder, even in the courtroom, the silence surrounding Tupac is still working overtime.
