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A criminal conviction this week in the murder of Tupac Shakur, the first since the rapper was gunned down in 1996, sent shockwaves through his sea of fans who have waited three decades for answers.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, a former California gang leader, was found guilty of murder on Monday for the role he played in orchestrating the fatal shooting of Shakur.
The case relied on several confessions from Davis, including his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, in which he described the events of 7 September 1996. Davis said he came up with a plan to retaliate against Shakur after the rapper’s entourage attacked Davis’s nephew in the lobby of the MGM Grand hotel.
Some of Shakur’s legions of fans reflected on what the artist meant to them while expressing bittersweet joy about the long-awaited moment.
As a teenager, Kelly Wilson, 48, was enamored with hip-hop’s boy wonder. (Shakur was just 25 years old when he died.) “There was a lot of depth to him that I just didn’t hear elsewhere,” the Seattle area resident said on Tuesday.
During his life, Shakur faced blowback over lyrics his detractors regarded as glorifying violence or gang culture. But he was also lauded as an inner-city chronicler, whose pen cast unrelenting social critiques of racial inequality, police brutality and other issues of the time.
“I’m as white Irish as you get,” Wilson said, but he connected with Shakur’s overarching philosophy, which Wilson described as: “Speak for the people who don’t have a voice.”
His children grew up steeped in Shakur’s legacy. One of them, 22-year-old Julian Wilson, drew a parallel to Davis’s trial and one of the first songs in Shakur’s discography that he deeply studied.
The music video for Hail Mary, a track he recorded in 1996, begins with a scene where one incarcerated man laments being wrongfully imprisoned. “Revenge has a funny, funny way of setting the score, and when it happens, you will know,” a fellow inmate consoles him.
“That’s always stuck with me. Some things may take time, but it will always come around,” Julian Wilson said. “Even then, they still had faith that justice was going to be served no matter how long it took.”
The elder Wilson felt mixed emotions about Davis’s guilty verdict. “It’s nice to have the final chapter written for the family and those that need that healing,” he said.
At the same time, Wilson called the verdict “long overdue”, adding that others who may have been more culpable have since passed away. (Authorities have long suspected Davis’s nephew, Orlando Anderson, of being the gunman. Anderson died in 2004.)
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Casey Rain, a British musician, was a moderator for HitEmUp.com, a forum dedicated to Shakur that was popular in the early aughts.
“I don’t mind admitting that there was a time in the years immediately following his passing where I definitely bought into some of those conspiracy theories. A lot of people did because we didn’t have access to the information that we have now,” Rain said, referencing longstanding fan theories about who killed Shakur, or whether Shakur was secretly still alive.
“Everything surrounding his murder has kind of existed in this middle ground of historical events and folklore. For somebody to be convicted of doing it, that grounds it and makes it real,” he continued. “This isn’t a sort of hip-hop, folklore, mythology story. This is a 25-year-old man that was murdered.”
In the end, Rain was also struck by how the case against Davis relied on his own admissions regarding the deadly night.
“It finally got solved because one of the people involved in it just wouldn’t shut up talking about it. It’s a really strange kind of irony. It’s astonishing,” Rain said.
Davis is set to be sentenced in October. The 63-year-old is facing at least 40 years in prison.
