A jailhouse phone call is undercutting Keefe D's defense as his murder trial over the killing of Tupac Shakur gets underway, HotNewHipHop and AllHipHop reported between August 9 and August 12. In the roughly seven-minute call, recorded shortly after his 2023 arrest, Keefe D is asked about his memoir and responds, "Oh, yeah, I did," according to AllHipHop, contradicting his attorneys' argument that a ghostwriter was behind his 2019 book, Compton Street Legend.
The memoir describes Keefe D, whose legal name is Duane Davis, as the leader of the South Side Compton Crips and recounts the September 1996 Las Vegas shooting that killed Tupac Shakur, including his account of passing a gun into the back seat of the car before the attack. Nevada judge Carli Kierny ruled in June that prosecutors could use the book at trial, finding that Keefe D had adopted its account as his own.
The jail call surfaced as jury selection began on August 10, when the court questioned a pool of 75 potential jurors, HotNewHipHop reported. Keefe D was denied bail before the trial began, and the trial is expected to last about a month, with Suge Knight, the only other surviving witness to the shooting, expected to testify for the prosecution.
Keefe D faces life in prison if convicted. XXL reported on August 12 that prosecutors plan to lean on the book, which also details his account of an earlier altercation between Tupac and his nephew, Orlando Anderson, that they say set off the fatal shooting.
The case has drawn other figures into the open: Keefe D has separately said Sean Diddy Combs played no role in Tupac's killing, while Suge Knight has said he would upend the case from the stand, and the trial itself formally opened in Las Vegas thirty years after the shooting.
The facts
- A jail call has entered the dispute over Keefe D's memoir
- In the call he tells a woman he wrote the book himself
- Keefe D's defense had argued a ghostwriter wrote it
- The memoir is called Compton Street Legend
- Judge Carli Kierny ruled the book admissible in June
- Jury selection began August 10 with a pool of 75 jurors
- Keefe D was denied bail ahead of trial
- Suge Knight is expected to testify for the prosecution
How this checks out
Developing
Reported by 3 independent outlets
A few outlets have it so far, short of the bar we set for confirmed.
Cited sources 3
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