Nearly three decades after Tupac Shakur was gunned down near the Las Vegas Strip, the murder case against the man accused of orchestrating the killing may collapse, not because of reasonable doubt, but because law enforcement agencies lost the files.
Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo admitted in a recent court hearing before Judge Carli Kierny that critical investigative records from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the LAPD, and the Drug Enforcement Administration are missing, corrupted, or simply unavailable to prosecutors. The trial of Duane "Keefe D" Davis is set to begin August 10.
Five weeks out from a murder trial nearly thirty years in the making, the state's own prosecutor is telling a judge he cannot get his hands on the evidence. The defense wants the case thrown out. And the man who bragged for years, on tape, in a memoir, on camera, about his role in one of the most infamous killings in American pop culture history may walk free because of bureaucratic failure.
The scope of the evidence problem, as reported by The Sun, is staggering. DiGiacomo told the court he tracked down Detective Brent Becker, the original LVMPD lead detective on the Tupac case. When DiGiacomo sent Becker a list of the reports currently in the DA's possession, Becker's response was blunt: there were "substantially more reports than that."
Where did those reports go? Becker and his colleagues had saved their investigative files to two 3.5-inch floppy discs, the kind of storage medium that was already becoming obsolete by the early 2000s. In 2018, an LVMPD detective named Mogg sent those discs, along with DVDs containing surveillance footage of Davis in California, two small cassettes, and a micro-cassette, to be preserved.
The result was a catalog of failure. DiGiacomo laid it out for the court plainly:
"One disc, they found no information on. The other disc was corrupted."
The two video files and two audio recordings were successfully downloaded. The micro-cassette was not. And the rest of the original investigative reports from Detective Becker? Gone.
But the missing LVMPD files are only part of the problem. DiGiacomo also told Judge Kierny that the DA's office does not possess the records compiled by the LAPD task forces that investigated the linked murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. Those task forces, one formed around 2004-2005, another in the late 2000s led by LAPD detectives Greg Kading and Daryn Dupree, produced a file described as containing "tens of thousands of pages."
None of that is in the prosecution's hands.
Then there is the DEA. The federal agency ran a probe into Davis's alleged gang and drug operations that lasted at least a decade. That file could contain surveillance records, informant reports, and intelligence directly relevant to the murder case. DiGiacomo conceded the prosecution does not have it, and cannot get it.
"The only people who may have additional information are the DEA. And we don't have the ability to subpoena the DEA for those records."
The reason those files may be withheld, according to The Sun's reporting, is that agencies fear releasing details that could expose informants and put their lives at risk. That concern may be legitimate. But it does not change the fact that a murder prosecution is heading to trial with gaping holes in its evidentiary foundation.
DiGiacomo summed up the gap himself in court:
"What we do not have is an entire copy of what else the Task Force did, as it relates to their investigation of Biggie Smalls and or Tupac. That's just not in our possession."
Davis's defense attorney, Mike Sanft, is not letting the moment pass. He told The Sun that the Clark County District Attorney's office has had three decades to build this case, and still cannot produce the evidence.
"The Clark County District Attorney has had 30 years to put their case together."
Sanft pointed out that prosecutors re-presented evidence to a grand jury in 2023 that led to Davis's arrest at his Henderson, Nevada home on September 30 of that year. If the state thought it had enough then, what happened to the rest?
"The State ought to avoid this embarrassment of a case and dismiss it before we have to put on a trial."
An unnamed friend of Davis told The Sun that the defendant is "in a positive frame of mind about the trial and believes the state cannot win." The friend added that confirmation from the DA that law enforcement reports about Davis's connections to Tupac will not be entered as evidence "makes him immensely happy."
The bitter irony of this case is that Davis did more to build the prosecution's case than any detective. For years, he talked, openly, repeatedly, and in extraordinary detail, about his alleged role in Tupac Shakur's murder.
He wrote a memoir called Compton Street Legend in which he described what happened the night Tupac was shot. He claimed he passed the gun to his nephew, Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, who pulled the trigger. He wrote that rapper Diddy offered him a million dollars to "handle" Tupac and Suge Knight. He boasted that his drug enterprise was worth billions and that he regularly brought in shipments of 350 kilos of cocaine through connections to Mexican and Colombian cartels.
Davis also sat for at least two taped police confessions with LAPD detectives. In one, he described the scene after the shooting with chilling casualness:
"We didn't give a f***... The ambulance [for Tupac] was parked right here next to us. That s*** was as funny as a motherf*****."
Davis believed at the time that he could not be prosecuted. His attorney has since claimed the memoir was fictionalized, and Davis now says the confessions were lies made under a plea deal to help beat other charges.
When police raided a house in Henderson, Nevada in July 2023 as part of the Tupac investigation, bodycam footage captured Davis, handcuffed, bragging to officers that he was involved in the "biggest case in Las Vegas history."
A grand jury convened later that year. Jurors listened to hours of testimony from former cops, detectives, coroners, gang members, and associates. They were shown graphic photos of Tupac's body. They decided there was enough evidence to prosecute. Davis was arrested September 30, 2023, and has been held at the Clark County Detention Center since, unable to make bail. He pleaded not guilty and faces life in prison if convicted.
Even before the missing-evidence revelation, the case had vulnerabilities. Grand jury witness Devonta Lee claimed a different gangster, someone called Big Dre, fired the fatal shots, not Orlando Anderson. Suge Knight, the former Death Row Records boss and the only other person still alive from either car at the scene, claimed in a TMZ interview from prison that Orlando was not the shooter. Knight has said he will not testify, though the defense reportedly hopes to change his mind.
Davis's former attorney, Carl Arnold, once claimed Davis was not even in Las Vegas the night of the shooting, a claim that sits awkwardly alongside Davis's own detailed accounts of being there.
The contradictions run deep. Davis spent years publicly confessing to involvement in a murder. Now he says it was all fiction. The prosecution has a defendant who told the world he did it, but may not be able to produce the underlying police work that corroborates or contextualizes those admissions.
And the agencies that spent decades investigating? LVMPD stored files on floppy discs that degraded into uselessness. The LAPD's tens of thousands of pages of task force records are not in the DA's possession. The DEA will not hand over its files. The Sun reached out to LVMPD for comment and received no response.
Tupac Shakur was shot on September 7, 1996. He died six days later. For nearly three decades, the case was treated as one of the great unsolved mysteries of American crime, even as Davis went on television, wrote a book, and sat for recorded police interviews describing what happened.
Former LAPD detective Greg Kading urged Las Vegas police to arrest Davis as far back as 2020. The arrest did not come until 2023. And now, with a trial date finally set, the prosecution is telling a judge it cannot locate the investigative record.
This is not a case that fell through the cracks because the evidence was thin or the suspects were unknown. This is a case where multiple law enforcement agencies, local, state, and federal, accumulated mountains of investigative material over decades, and then could not keep track of it. Files stored on obsolete media. Records held by agencies that refuse to share them. A micro-cassette that no one can play.
Davis wrote in his memoir that "the Feds knew everything" because informants were talking, and that federal agents followed him everywhere after the killing. If that is true, the record of what they learned may exist somewhere in a DEA vault that the Clark County DA says he has no power to open.
The trial is set for August 10. Whether Judge Kierny entertains a defense motion to dismiss remains to be seen. The prosecution still has Davis's own recorded words, his confessions, his memoir, his on-camera boasting. Whether that is enough to convict without the underlying police files is the question that will define this case.
Davis, now reportedly dealing with health problems including cancer, sits in the Clark County Detention Center waiting. His friend told The Sun he is "taking everything as a win the moment."
The victims of this institutional failure are not hard to identify. Tupac Shakur's family has waited twenty-nine years for accountability. The public has watched a self-described participant in a murder tour the media circuit for years without consequence. And now the system that finally moved to prosecute may have fumbled the evidence into oblivion.
When law enforcement cannot manage its own filing cabinets, or its own floppy discs, justice does not just get delayed. It gets lost along with the paperwork.
