Tupac Shakur’s death has returned to the minds of many these days, as a man stands trial for his murder nearly three decades after the rapper and actor was gunned down. The renewed attention is also a reminder that Shakur thought about his own mortality often — and said so, out loud, again and again. In a now famous Vibe magazine interview the year before his death at the age of 25, Shakur told journalist Kevin Powell, “I don’t have no fear of death.” “My only fear is coming back reincarnated,” he said at the time. “I’m not trying to make people think I’m in here faking it, but my whole life is going to be about saving somebody. I got to represent life.” Ultimately, no one was able to save Shakur, who died days after a hail of bullets struck the car he and Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight were driving near the Las Vegas Strip on September 7, 1996, following a Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand. A trial decades in the making Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, is now on trial for allegedly masterminding that killing. Prosecutors don’t claim he pulled the trigger — they allege he orchestrated the ambush from inside a white Cadillac that pulled alongside Shakur’s BMW, in retaliation for an earlier assault on his nephew, Orlando Anderson, at the MGM Grand after the fight. The case hinges largely on Davis’ own words. He spoke openly — in interviews, on the VladTV podcast, and in a memoir he co-wrote, “Compton Street Legend: Notorious Keffe D’s Street-Level Accounts of Tupac and Biggie Murders, Death Row Origins, Suge Knight, Puffy Combs, and Crooked Cops” — about his claimed involvement in the crime. Davis’ 2019 memoir later became a key piece of evidence in the murder case against him, with prosecutors relying heavily on his own published account of the shooting and other public statements. Davis has pleaded not guilty and is now denying any involvement, including claiming he wasn’t in Las Vegas that night in a recent jailhouse interview with KLAS. His defense appears to be akin to rappers who display bravado in their lyrics: What he has said in the past can be chalked up to exaggeration designed to publicize the book. During opening statements, Davis’ defence attorney told the jury not to believe his client’s statements. “Keffe D was known to do this,” he said with the word “bullsh*t” printed on a large screen for the jury. A prolific chronicler of his own death The power of words sits at the heart of the current trial but was also a defining feature of Shakur’s life. A prolific lyricist, he used his music constantly to work through his thoughts on both life and death, rapping in “Smile” about wanting his own funeral turned into a party, and, on the posthumously released “Thugz Mansion,” imagining himself telling his mother not to cry because he was doing fine in heaven. That there was still music left to release after he died speaks to how Shakur worked. He spent long stretches in the studio recording, driven, according to his stepbrother Mopreme Shakur, by a sense that his time was limited. Mopreme Shakur has said that if you listen closely through Shakur’s catalog, there’s a constant thread running through it — a “death chant,” he called it, always circling back to mortality. According to his step sibling, Shakur was far from alone in that: For many young Black men of his generation, violence and early death weren’t abstract fears but a lived, ever-present possibility. The shooting that changed everything Shakur had already survived one such brush with death. In November 1994, he was shot multiple times during a robbery in the lobby of Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan. The attack helped ignite the East Coast–West Coast rap rivalry that many believe eventually contributed to his murder. According to an excerpt from Ben Westhoff’s book “Original Gangstas,” published by Vice in 2016, Shakur came to believe that a group he encountered at the studio that night — including producer Sean “Puffy” Combs and his close friend and fellow rapper Christopher Wallace, known as the Notorious B.I.G. — had a hand in the ambush. Shakur later described the group as looking guilty and startled when he rode the elevator up, wounded, and found them there, as recounted in the book’s excerpt. Combs and Wallace denied any connection, with Combs insisting they’d shown Shakur nothing but concern. The fallout compounded quickly. Shortly after the shooting, Shakur was convicted of sexual abuse in connection to a young woman, Ayanna Jackson, who said she was attacked in his New York hotel suite after meeting him previously. Sentenced to a year and a half in prison pending appeal, with bail set at US$3 million, Shakur reached out to Knight for help. Knight paid Shakur’s bail and signed him to Death Row Records in Los Angeles, absorbing his artist’s growing animosity toward Combs, Wallace and their Bad Boy Records circle in New York. That alliance hardened the East Coast–West Coast feud into something far more dangerous — one later blamed, at least in part, for both Shakur’s murder and, less than a year afterward, the still-unsolved drive-by killing of Wallace in Los Angeles at age 24. Time to think Prison gave Shakur time he hadn’t asked for. “I feel like this jail time was like a coma, except I got to think,” he told CNN on October 24, 1995. He described watching the world move around him without being part of it. It was a fitting description of a life defined by that same tension — an artist whose gritty lyrics about surviving the streets mirrored a reality he couldn’t outrun. Raised in poverty by his mother, former Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur, he cycled in and out of legal trouble throughout his short adult life, including a 1993 case in which he shot two off-duty police officers in Atlanta, charges that were later dropped after evidence surfaced that undercut the officers’ version of events. Thirty years later, still unfinished Nearly 30 years on, the case remains unresolved in the fullest sense. A conviction, if it comes, would answer who allegedly organized the killing, but potentially not who fired the fatal shots. Many of those thought to have been involved in Shakur’s fatal shooting have since died. For Shakur’s family, watching it unfold has been draining. His stepbrother has talked about how difficult it has all been for the family and told CNN they remain “cautiously optimistic” about the trial. Mopreme Shakur and Sekyiwa Shakur, Tupac’s sister, have been in the court gallery throughout the start of the trial. They chose to leave before prosecutors showed graphic autopsy photos of Shakur in court last week. Family friend Tuere Burns initially remained, but covered her eyes with her hand as the first photos were shown and then walked out of the courtroom, visibly shaken. Whatever the verdict in the trial, it likely won’t cease the enduring fascination with Shakur, who wrote and rapped about death so often, so specifically, that it can read almost like prophecy in hindsight. But the truer thread running through his music was as much about urgency as death. He treated every verse like it might be his last, because on some level he suspected it would be. Three decades later, his listeners are left with his thoughts on how he believed it would all end. “I believe God blesses us. I believe God blesses those that hustle, those that use their mind and those that overall are righteous,” he said in an interview widely shared on social media. “I believe that your karma, everything that you do bad, comes back to you. So anything that I’m doing that’s bad, I’m gonna have to suffer for, but in my heart, I think what I’m doing is right, you know what I mean, so I feel like I’m going to heaven.”
