More than 25 years after the killing of Tupac Shakur became a defining tragedy in hip-hop, a self-described gang member who has repeatedly proclaimed that he participated in the drive-by shooting of the rapper was indicted on a murder charge, Las Vegas prosecutors announced on Friday, reviving a blockbuster investigation that had long stalled.
The man, Duane Keith Davis, has said in interviews and a memoir that he was in the passenger seat of the white Cadillac that pulled up near the vehicle holding Shakur on a night in 1996, after a Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon prizefight in Las Vegas.
Shot four times, the 25-year-old rapper died at a hospital less than a week later.
A grand jury in Clark County indicted Davis on one count of murder with use of a deadly weapon and with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang, a prosecutor said in court on Friday. The prosecutor said Davis was in custody; his arrest was first reported by The Associated Press.
Despite plentiful speculation, evidence and reporting surrounding the murder across the span of nearly three decades, no charges had ever been filed in the shooting of Tupac, who had already become one of the most popular artists of the 1990s, with tracks that brought poetic gravitas to confrontational gangster rap. But talk of the case was revived in July, when the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department executed a search warrant at a home in Henderson, Nev., connected to Davis.