Reggie Wright Jr. Took The Stand In The Tupac Trial And Said Keffe D Was A Crackhead

Reggie Wright Jr. took the stand Tuesday in Las Vegas on the second day of Duane “Keffe D” Davis’s murder trial and, according to reporters covering the proceedings, told jurors that Davis was known as a crackhead at one point before he became a drug dealer. That characterization has been circulating from courtroom trial coverage rather than from a wire report, so treat the exact wording as reported from the room rather than confirmed by the court record.

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What is not in dispute is who was sitting in that chair and why it matters. Reggie Wright Jr. was the head of security for Death Row Records, and he was doing that job while still working as a sworn police officer in Compton, California. His father was a lieutenant with Compton PD. In 1997, after Suge Knight was out of the picture, Wright became general manager of Death Row itself. He testified from an electric scooter, which he attributed to the lingering effects of Long Covid.

The reason his testimony carries weight has nothing to do with security logistics. In July, in a jailhouse interview with the 8 News Now Investigators, Davis pointed at Reggie Wright Jr. as the person the evidence actually implicates in Tupac Shakur’s killing, saying Wright brought his name up from day one. Wright called him a liar in that same reporting and said Davis could never produce a single dollar Death Row ever paid him. So on Tuesday, the man the defendant has been publicly accusing took the stand for the prosecution. Prosecutor Binu Palal asked him directly whether he had anything to do with Shakur’s murder. Wright denied it.

Davis is 63. He was indicted in 2023 on one count of murder with a deadly weapon and has pleaded not guilty. He is the first and only person ever charged in connection with the September 7, 1996 shooting, when a white Cadillac pulled alongside the BMW carrying Shakur and Knight near the Las Vegas Strip and opened fire. Shakur died a week later. He was 25.

Prosecutors told jurors in their opening statement that the shooting was revenge for a beating that Davis’s nephew, Orlando Anderson, took at the MGM Grand earlier that same night. Their case leans heavily on Davis’s own words, which he has been supplying for years: a 2018 docuseries, podcast appearances, and his 2019 memoir “Compton Street Legend,” in which he wrote that he obtained the gun and was in the car but did not pull the trigger. Some of those statements came out of what lawyers call a proffer, which is an arrangement where a suspect tells investigators what they know under a promise that the specific statements will not be used to prosecute them. The problem for Davis is that a proffer covers what you say to investigators in that setting. It does not cover what you say on television and in a book you sold.

His attorney, Michael Sanft, is arguing the opposite side of that same coin: that none of it was ever verified. Sanft has said the evidence has gone cold, and on day one he spent his time questioning how thoroughly investigators worked a case that sat for nearly three decades. On cross-examination of Reggie Wright Jr., Sanft walked him through his rise inside Death Row, noting that after Knight was out, Wright took over a label valued at $3 million. The implication was not subtle.

Which is where the crackhead line actually lands. The prosecution’s case is Davis’s own mouth. If jurors believe Davis was a man who inflated his own legend for cameras and book money, the confessions get weaker. If jurors believe he was exactly the shot caller he described himself as, the confessions get stronger. Wright’s framing of him as somebody who came up from crack use into dealing paints him as a man with something to prove, which cuts in a direction the defense may not hate. But Wright is also the man Davis is accusing of the murder, so the jury has to weigh whether he has his own reason to talk about Davis that way. Two witnesses, two credibility problems, one dead artist.

Tuesday was heavy in other ways too. Before Wright, jurors heard from James McDonald, a former Mob Piru member who ran security at Knight’s Club 662 and who made clear he did not want to be there, telling the prosecutor to treat him as a hostile witness. A hostile witness is uncooperative on the stand, which lets the side that called them question them more aggressively. McDonald said he appeared only because he was subpoenaed and had grandchildren and did not want to run. At one point he looked over at Davis and told him to talk to his lawyer. He also said he did not want to send Davis to prison even though the two of them do not like each other.

Earlier that morning, prosecutors showed the jury autopsy photos of Shakur taken after six days in the hospital, with hospital tubes still connected to his face. The Thug Life tattoo was visible. Members of Shakur’s family were in the room.

Wright also testified that he added a second security guard to Shakur’s detail after “Hit ‘Em Up” came out, which is a quiet detail that says a lot. Everybody around that label understood what that record was going to set off. Thirty years later, a jury in Las Vegas is finally being asked to decide who actually pulled the trigger on it.