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Tupac Shakur’s murder case finally reached a courtroom after three decades of silence, and the first day of testimony revealed just how little investigators actually saw the night he was gunned down in Las Vegas.
Witness Ingrid Stokes was riding in a car near the shooting and described the moment everything changed when she heard gunfire erupt around her.
She and her friends had been following Marion “Suge” Knight’s BMW through the Strip when a white Cadillac pulled alongside and opened fire, and Stokes said she grabbed her friend’s head and pulled her down as chaos erupted around them.
Former homicide detective Brent Becker testified about the investigation’s most glaring problem: the shooter’s identity remained almost completely unknown to police.
When asked what descriptions witnesses provided of the gunman, Becker responded plainly that investigators had “the only thing we had was a black arm.”
That single detail, captured by multiple eyewitnesses, became the foundation of a case that would sit cold for nearly thirty years.
Becker also revealed that one witness, Yaki Kadafi of The Outlawz, was later murdered in New Jersey, adding another layer of tragedy to an already complicated investigation.
The prosecution’s case centers on Duane “Keefe D” Davis, whom prosecutors say orchestrated the shooting as retaliation for his nephew Orlando Anderson being beaten by Tupac and his crew at the MGM Grand casino earlier that evening.
Prosecutor Binu Palal argued that Davis passed a gun to someone in the backseat of his white Cadillac and ordered them to fire into Tupac’s car.
Keefe D has pleaded not guilty, and his defense attorney, Michael Sanft, immediately attacked the investigation itself, calling it “biased, sloppy and incomplete,” with missing police reports and questionable witness credibility.
Sanft challenged whether Davis was even in Las Vegas that night, let alone driving the vehicle connected to the shooting.
“We don’t have any facts outside of statements made allegedly by Keefe D and other people; we don’t have anything to verify any of that information. Not one single thing to corroborate the statements made by that man in 2008 or 2009. Not by Metro, by the FBI, by LAPD, by the DEA, by the United States Attorney’s Office. No one corroborates any of this,” Sanft said.
The trial is expected to last approximately one month, with roughly forty witnesses set to testify.
