About 10,000 people were in the arena watching. One of them was Tupac Shakur, the number one-selling rapper who had already become a hip-hop icon at the age of 25.
Away from the ring on September 7, 1996, a bicoastal beef that had been brewing for years in the music industry was about to reach its tragic apogee. Hours after Tyson’s left hook sent Seldon face-first to the mat, Shakur was hit by four bullets in his vehicle – a drive-by shooting just off the Vegas Strip. Tupac’s right lung was destroyed. After six days on life support, he was pronounced dead.
It took 109 seconds to settle the boxing match. It has taken 30 years for anyone to face trial over Shakur’s murder.
Jury selection started today for Duane Keith Davis – known as Keffe D – who was indicted in 2023 on one count of murder with a deadly weapon in Tupac Shakur’s death. Davis, 63, has entered a not guilty plea. Prosecutors do not claim he fired the fatal shots. They say Davis orchestrated the killing in retaliation for an assault on his nephew shortly after the Tyson fight.
Shakur’s death – and the similar drive-by murder of his rival Christopher Wallace, better known as Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G., less than a year later – put an uncomfortable light on the increasingly angry rivalry between East Coast and West Coast rap and whether artistic disputes were turning into violent real-world battles. Now, the Keffe D case is exposing just how deeply gang culture had become embedded in the industry’s embrace of the gangsta lifestyle, embodied in an artist whose work both lamented the violence that cut many young Black lives short while also glorifying it.
“He was working through his trauma with his art, his music, his poetry,” said former MTV journalist Abbie Kearse, who interviewed Shakur in 1994, “and yes, the anger comes out in real life, too, through violence.”
Shakur enters the music scene, both sensitive and powerful
Tupac Shakur wasn’t just about beats and rhymes. Coming up from a rough childhood with an absent father and addicted mother, Vanity Fair reported, Shakur combined a love of hip-hop and other performing arts with classical poetry and Shakespeare.
The former student of the Baltimore School of the Arts also became a critically praised actor in films alongside Janet Jackson and Omar Epps, earning his first role in “Juice” on the strength of his own magnetism after crashing a friend’s audition. Three films starring Shakur were released after his death.
But outside the studio and off-camera, his rising success was accompanied by repeated legal battles and violent encounters.
Legal troubles send Shakur down dangerous path
Tupac was charged with shooting two off-duty police officers during a scuffle in Atlanta in 1993. Those charges were eventually dropped.
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