Tupac Shakur’s sister broke down in tears in a Las Vegas courtroom on Tuesday as Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis, the man convicted of orchestrating the hip-hop legend’s murder, was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison, more than three decades after the rapper was gunned down.
Sekyiwa ‘Set’ Shakur delivered an emotional speech to the court as she described losing not just her older brother, but the man she had looked up to as a father figure.
“The brother, four years my senior, but he’s also my father figure – he was charged with being the man in the home, he was charged with the person to be responsible and take care of me,” she said.
“I miss my brother. I miss his laugh,” Sekyiwa told the court. “We lost something… our whole generation lost something huge. September 13, 1996. I was the little sister that just wanted to be with my brother.”
Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny handed down the sentence following Davis’ conviction for first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon.
“None of the members of my family were the same again. The loss of Tupac that day – for a long time crippled my entire family emotionally and mentally. I’ve been hospitalised… multiple times for depression, suicide ideation and trauma, PTSD,” Sekyiwa Shakur said as Davis watched from the courtroom.
A jury found the former South Side Compton Crips gang leader guilty on 31 August 2026 of organising the fatal drive-by shooting, although prosecutors acknowledged he had not personally pulled the trigger.
Prosecutors argued that Davis orchestrated the attack and supplied the murder weapon. Much of their case rested on his own accounts, including interviews and a 2019 memoir in which he acknowledged being inside the white Cadillac from which the fatal shots were fired.
His defence insisted those accounts had been fabricated for financial gain and challenged the evidence linking him to the killing. Davis has said he intends to appeal.
Shakur was shot multiple times on 7 September, 1996, while travelling in a BMW with music executive Marion ‘Suge’ Knight near the Las Vegas Strip. Knight survived, but the 25-year-old rapper died six days later.
Prosecutors said the killing was an act of revenge following an earlier confrontation at a Las Vegas casino, where members of Shakur’s entourage had attacked Davis’ nephew, Orlando Anderson.
Davis was arrested in 2023 and remains the only person ever charged and convicted in the rapper’s murder, a case that went unsolved for nearly three decades.
