Tupac Shakur died in a hail of gunfire on the Las Vegas strip in September 1996.
Thirty years later, a Las Vegas jury is finally hearing exactly what happened that night.
A witness just told jurors what Tupac did with his own hands, reportedly, just hours before he died.
The Casino Beatdown Caught on Camera Two Hours Before the Shots
Surveillance cameras inside the MGM Grand rolled tape that night.
The footage shows a group of men swarming Orlando Anderson, who had on a white Dan Marino football jersey.
They kick him.
They punch him.
Then they bolt through the casino floor and vanish into the Las Vegas night.
Prosecutors told jurors this week that two of those attackers were Tupac Shakur and Marion "Suge" Knight.
Former officer Reginald Wright Jr. testified he identified both men on that surveillance tape.
Officer Kenneth Rios said he responded to Anderson afterward and initially thought Anderson was the victim.
Two hours later, gunshots rang out at a red light on Las Vegas Boulevard.
Tupac took multiple rounds.
Knight was grazed.
Tupac died six days later, and the case went unsolved for twenty seven years.
Prosecutors say the beating was payback for a stolen chain at a Lakewood Mall days earlier.
A member of Anderson's crew allegedly snatched a Death Row associate's Death Row chain, and the MGM Grand hallway was where that insult got answered.
Casino security cameras caught the whole retaliation on tape before anyone could stop it.
The Confession Duane Davis Gave Investigators Twelve Years Later
Prosecutors say Anderson's uncle, Duane "Keffe D" Davis, orchestrated retaliation for his nephew's beating that same night.
Davis never pulled the trigger, prosecutors say, but he supplied the gun used in the killing.
Federal investigators recorded Davis describing the shooting back in 2008.
That recording became public a year later, long before Nevada prosecutors ever charged him with anything.
Davis allegedly told investigators he passed the murder weapon into the back seat of the Cadillac because Tupac's side of Knight's car wasn't in his line of fire.
"If the car was on his side of the Cadillac, he would have fired," prosecutors say Davis admitted on tape.
Defense attorney Michael Sanft told jurors that old confession is the entire case against his client.
"There's no facts," Sanft argued, outside of Davis's own decades old words.
Sanft says witnesses vanished, leads went cold, and Las Vegas police let the investigation sit for a generation.
Newsweek's coverage of the trial has focused on a different fight entirely.
Davis published a memoir years before his arrest claiming credit for the shooting in vivid detail.
Prosecutors are now walking jurors through which parts of that book match his 2008 recorded statements and which parts do not.
The gap between the book and the confession is exactly where the defense is trying to live.
The Twenty Seven Year Wait That Finally Put Davis on Trial
Here's what should bother you about this case.
Everybody in Compton and Las Vegas knew who did this by 1997.
Investigators sat on Davis's own recorded confession for over a decade while he walked free, wrote a memoir describing the killing, and cashed the checks.
This case went cold the same way half of America's unsolved gang murders from the nineties still sit cold – Biggie Smalls included – because prosecutors treated hip hop violence as a lower priority than they would treat any other execution on a public street.
That is not an accident of bad luck.
It is the same soft on crime culture that let career gang shooters walk free in city after city for a generation, right up until Nevada finally charged Davis in 2023.
Whatever this jury decides, Tupac Shakur waited twenty seven years for anyone wearing a badge to say his name out loud in a courtroom.
Sources:
- "Witness Says Tupac Joined Attack on Duane Davis' Nephew Hours Before Shooting Death," Courthouse News Service, August 19, 2026.
- "Tupac Murder: Biggest Revelations From Duane Davis Trial Opening Statements," Newsweek, August 2026.
- "Tupac Shakur Murder Trial Begins, Witnesses Testify," CNN, August 17, 2026.
- "Tupac Shakur's 1996 Murder Was an Act of Revenge, Prosecutor Tells Jury in Trial of Accused Mastermind," CBS News, August 2026.
