Nearly 30 years after 2Pac was shot and killed in Las Vegas, the rap icon’s murder trial kicked off with jury selection taking place on Monday (Aug. 10), as Duane “Keffe D” Davis faces a murder charge following his 2023 arrest.
Death Row Records cofounder Suge Knight remains the lone living witness to Tupac Shakur’s murder. Knight was driving with 2Pac in the passenger seat when his car was riddled with bullets in the Sept. 7, 1996, drive-by shooting at the intersection of Flamingo and Koval after leaving a Mike Tyson fight at nearby MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
Suge Knight has never cooperated with authorities regarding Pac’s murder, and has no plans to be part of the trial three decades later. “I don’t get paid to solve homicides,” the 61-year-old told ABC News.
Knight continued: “They make me come there against my will. If Keffe D’s lawyers bring me there, it don’t look good for him. If the prosecution brings me there, it don’t look good for them. Leave me out of it … You have people who wasn’t there, wasn’t in the car, but they’re telling the story.”
Even though it’s been nearly 30 years since Shakur’s killing, Suge Knight asserted, “There’s not a day that goes by that [I], personally, [don’t] think about 2Pac, or I miss 2Pac. That’s my brother.”
Knight claimed that taking the stand would be worse than “shooting” a man in the head because “if you snitch on that person, they die a million times.”
“I am not going to be responsible for sending another man to prison for the rest of his life,” he added. “If God’s forgiving, who am I to think I’m bigger than God and don’t forgive? Because I’m not.”
Suge Knight is currently locked up in California and serving a 28-year sentence after pleading no contest to involuntary manslaughter for a fatal 2015 hit-and-run.
Prosecutors allege that while Duane “Keffe D” Davis wasn’t the triggerman in Pac’s death, they believe he orchestrated the 1996 attack against the West Coast rapper. Knight was injured in the shooting, but Pac was struck four times and succumbed to his wounds six days later on Sept. 13.
Davis, 63, pleaded not guilty following his 2023 arrest, and the former Crips gang leader has maintained his innocence, claiming he wasn’t even in the state of Nevada at the time of 2Pac’s shooting.
