Tupac’s Last Words Were “We’ll Take Care of It.” Then Jurors Saw His Autopsy
Thirty years after the rapper was shot on the Las Vegas Strip, Duane “Keffe D” Davis is on trial. Prosecutors say his own book put him there.
LAS VEGAS — Nearly 30 years after Tupac Shakur was gunned down in a drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas Strip, a courtroom finally heard how he spent his final conscious minutes.
“No, we’ll take care of it.”
Those were Tupac’s last words, according to testimony this week in the murder trial of Duane Keith “Keffe D” Davis.
Garry Dale, a retired Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officer, told jurors he had pulled over Shakur and Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight for a missing rear license plate on the night of Sept. 7, 1996. He let them go with a warning. Minutes later, they were shot.
Dale rode in the ambulance with Shakur to the hospital.
“I was trying to talk to him to find out what had happened, gather information to see who had fired at them,” Dale testified. “He was still talking, and I was trying to convince him to tell me the name of whoever his assailants were.”
Shakur, 25, refused.
“He repeated ‘we’ll take care of it’ a couple times, but I couldn’t get him to talk to me any further than that,” Dale said.
Shakur died six days later. On Tuesday, jurors saw why.
What The Autopsy Showed
Forensic pathologist and Clark County medical examiner Dr. Lisa Gavin testified that photos of Shakur’s body during his autopsy were shown to jurors. The images were not released to the public broadcast, but her description was.
The bullet that killed him entered through his right armpit area and went through a lung into his chest. In the images, his famous “Thug Life” chest tattoo was still visible.
Shakur’s lung collapsed, began bleeding, and was later removed by surgeons during emergency surgery. A second bullet struck his right thigh, traveled into his abdomen, and damaged his intestines.
“He died of gunshot wounds of chest and abdomen,” Gavin concluded. She said Shakur had no wounds to the head.
The testimony came on day two of the trial of Davis, 63, the only person ever charged in connection with the killing. Davis has pleaded not guilty to one count of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang. If convicted, he faces life in prison.
The trial, before Judge Carli Kierny in Clark County District Court, is expected to last up to six weeks. Jury selection began Aug. 10.
Why It Took 30 Years
Police have long said they suspected Davis, the self-described former leader of the South Side Compton Crips, but lacked enough admissible evidence to charge him.
That changed when Davis started talking.
Prosecutors allege Davis orchestrated the shooting as retaliation after Shakur and Knight beat up his nephew, a fellow Crips member, inside the MGM Grand casino hours earlier, following a Mike Tyson vs. Bruce Seldon fight.
Davis allegedly obtained the murder weapon and handed it to two other men in the rear seat of a white Cadillac as they hunted for Shakur and Knight’s BMW.
At a pretrial hearing, prosecutors put it bluntly: “Had Mr. Davis never opened his mouth, never written the book, he would probably not have been prosecuted for the crime.”
That book is now the centerpiece of the case.
In 2019, Davis 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,” in which he admitted being in the car and providing the gun used to shoot Shakur.
Davis later tried to have the book excluded, arguing his account was misrepresented by his co-author and that police interviews in 2008 and 2009 were an “involuntary confession” made when he was afraid for himself and his family. A Las Vegas judge denied the request, ruling Davis “chose to release [the memoir] to the public and profit off it.”
The Defense: “Don’t Believe My Client”
In a strategy that has stunned court watchers on X, Davis’s defense attorney Michael Sandt told jurors not to take his own client seriously.
“Just look at the actual facts. What facts do you have to support any of what Keffe D said in any of his interviews or the book?” Sandt said in opening statements, calling his client’s stories “bullshit.”
Under Nevada law, Davis can be charged with murder if he took part in the crime without pulling the trigger. Police have not said who fired the gun. The three other men in the Cadillac with Davis have all since died.
The Diddy Claim and the East Coast-West Coast Feud
The trial has also revived one of hip-hop’s most persistent conspiracy theories.
According to a Drug Enforcement Administration report filed in court and obtained by USA TODAY, Davis told police that Sean “Diddy” Combs placed a $1 million bounty on Shakur and Knight.
Combs, who owned New York-based Bad Boy Records at the time — affiliated with the Crips and locked in a bitter rivalry with Death Row Records, which prosecutors say had ties to the Bloods — has denied any involvement. Combs is currently serving a 50-month federal prison sentence after a July 2025 conviction on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. A spokesperson for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has said Combs has never been a suspect.
The rivalry defined mid-90s hip-hop. In 1994, Shakur was shot five times during a robbery at Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan while Combs and The Notorious B.I.G. were upstairs. In 1995, Suge Knight publicly dissed Bad Boy at The Source Awards. A month later, Knight’s close friend Jai Hassan-Jamal “Big Jake” Robles was shot and killed at a party attended by both crews.
Six months after Shakur was killed, Biggie Smalls, 24, was shot and killed in Los Angeles in what many believe was retaliation. His murder remains unsolved.
Who Will Testify?
The prosecution released a 200-person witness list Aug. 4. Among the most anticipated names is Suge Knight himself, who told TMZ in 2023: “I wouldn’t testify, none of that. 1000% I wouldn’t go.” Knight is serving a 28-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter in a fatal 2015 hit-and-run.
Also listed: Bad Boy co-founder Kirk Burrowes, Diddy’s former bodyguard Eugene “Gene” Deal, former Death Row security chief Reggie Wright Jr., and members of Shakur’s family.
For fans who grew up with “All Eyez on Me” — which had sold more than 5 million copies in the U.S. before his death — the trial is more than a legal proceeding. It is the first time the seminal moment that helped define the image of violence in hip-hop’s golden age is being examined under oath.
It took 109 seconds to settle the Tyson fight that night. It has taken 30 years for anyone to face trial over what happened after.
