Prosecutors in the Keefe D trial have filed a witness list running more than 200 names, and Suge Knight is on it.
The Clark County District Attorney’s office submitted the 16 page supplemental filing ahead of jury selection, which begins August 10 in Las Vegas. Duane “Keefe D” Davis, 62, is charged with murder with a deadly weapon in the September 7, 1996 drive by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur near Flamingo Road and Koval Lane. Prosecutors are seeking life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. Davis has pleaded not guilty.
Knight is the name everybody stopped on. He was driving the BMW with Shakur in the passenger seat when the white Cadillac pulled alongside and opened fire, and he walked away with minor injuries from bullet fragments while Shakur died six days later. That makes him the only person still living who was inside Shakur’s car. His address on the witness document is listed as the California Department of Corrections, where he is serving a 28 year sentence for voluntary manslaughter in a fatal 2015 hit and run.
He has also said, more than once and without much room for interpretation, that he would never do this. He told TMZ in 2023 that he would not go and “I wouldn’t testify, none of that.” In a separate Nevada court appearance after Davis was arrested that same year, he said he was not getting on a stand to testify against somebody, and asked what the point would be. Being on a witness list is not the same as showing up, and court records show motions have already been filed asking for several witnesses to testify remotely.
The rest of the roster is unusual for a murder case. Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo is on it, because he was with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in 1996. So is Oscar Goodman, 87, who spent decades defending organized crime figures before serving as mayor of Las Vegas from 1999 to 2011. Goodman’s son Ross briefly represented Davis in the early stage of this case.
Greg Kading, the former LAPD detective who has said Davis confessed his involvement during a 2009 interview with law enforcement, is listed. So is Yusuf Jah, who co-wrote Davis’s 2019 memoir Compton Street Legend, along with members of Shakur’s family and the lead homicide detective from the original investigation, who now lives out of state. Reggie Wright Jr., the former Death Row Records security chief, is a state witness, and Davis used an interview with 8 News Now this week to accuse Wright of being the one who actually did it.
One name people keep expecting is not there. Diddy is not on the Keefe D trial witness list. The confusion comes from reporting in February and March, sourced to people close to Davis and to his defense team, saying they hoped to call Sean Combs because they believe he would deny Davis’s long standing claim that Combs offered $1 million to have Shakur killed. That denial would support the defense theory that Davis invented his confessions for attention and money. Combs has denied involvement in Shakur’s death for nearly thirty years, prosecutors are not building around that allegation, and he is serving a four year sentence on two Mann Act convictions. The list filed Monday belongs to the prosecution, and he is not on it.
What the state is actually working with is Davis talking. He was indicted by a Clark County grand jury in September 2023, has been held on $750,000 bond since, and told the story repeatedly over the years: in recorded interviews with law enforcement, in his memoir, and in interviews on platforms including VladTV. He has said the shooting was retaliation for his nephew Orlando Anderson being beaten by Shakur and others at the MGM Grand after a Mike Tyson fight that night, and that Anderson fired from the back seat. Anderson denied involvement and was killed in a separate shooting in 1998.
Judge Carli Kierny ruled last week that the 2019 book comes into evidence. Coverage has been inconsistent on whether the recorded police interviews will be admitted, with one outlet reporting the judge found a 2008 interview admissible and another reporting she flagged the recordings as not clearly admissible and subject to revisiting. The defense argument in either case is the same. Davis now says there is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and that he embellished the story to sell books and get attention.
That is what the Keefe D trial comes down to. The state wants a jury to believe he was telling the truth every time he told it. His lawyers want that same jury to believe he was lying the whole time. And the only other man who was there and lived through it says he does not want to be in the room.
