A Detective Wanted to Arrest Keffe D for Tupac's Murder in 2009. He Testified He Was Told to 'Stand Down.'

The defense in the murder trial of Duane "Keffe D" Davis rested Thursday after calling three witnesses in under two hours, setting up closing arguments Monday in a Las Vegas case that has been open for nearly 30 years.

Davis, 63, is charged with one count of murder with use of a deadly weapon in the Sept. 7, 1996, drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur. He has pleaded not guilty and has been jailed since his arrest in September 2023. Prosecutors do not claim he fired the shots. They say he was the shot caller — that he obtained the gun, rode in the front passenger seat of a rented white Cadillac, and handed the weapon to the back seat, where his nephew Orlando Anderson opened fire on the BMW that Death Row Records co-founder Marion "Suge" Knight was driving with Shakur beside him.

The most striking testimony of the defense case came from former Las Vegas Metropolitan Police homicide detective Dan Long, who led the Shakur investigation from 2002 to 2017. Long testified that after a 2009 interview with Davis in Los Angeles, he returned to Las Vegas eager to type a warrant to have Davis arrested for murder. He was then told to "stand down," he said, apparently because of a proffer agreement Davis had signed with a joint LAPD and federal task force in December 2008 — an arrangement he said he did not know about at the time.

Defense attorney Michael Sanft used that testimony to push two themes at once: that authorities had effectively promised Davis protection for what he said, and that senior prosecutors did not, at the time, find his account credible enough to act on. Long also testified that the paper case file had to be locked down at one point because "curious" department employees were reading it, and that some of his reports were lost when the department changed electronic storage systems.

Sanft's other two witnesses were former LVMPD Sgt. Stan Hyt and former Lt. Charlie Mangrum, who said they were working overtime the night of the shooting, watching Knight's Las Vegas home ahead of an expected party following Mike Tyson's fight at the MGM Grand. Both said they saw a light-colored Cadillac arrive and later leave in a convoy that included Knight driving Shakur in his BMW. Witnesses have long described a light-colored Cadillac pulling alongside the BMW less than an hour later. Sanft did not connect the dots out loud. On cross-examination by Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo, Mangrum acknowledged his report that night listed the license plates of every vehicle entering Knight's property, and agreed that 1996 homicide detectives would have followed up on that.

Prosecutors rested Wednesday after calling 25 witnesses, leaning heavily on roughly eight hours of recordings in which Davis himself described the night — two proffer interviews in 2008 and 2009 and two more statements in 2017, plus his 2019 memoir, "Compton Street Legend." "I gave it to Dre, and Dre was like, 'No, no, no,'" Davis says in the 2008 recording, describing passing the gun to the back seat. "And Lane's like, 'Give it here.'" Judge Carli Kierny has ruled the memoir and the police interviews admissible; prosecutors argue Davis voided his limited immunity by telling the story publicly for money.

The prosecution's exposure is physical evidence, or the absence of it. "Any DNA, fingerprints, and the murder weapon are long gone," former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told CNN. Before leaving the stand, Long answered a juror's written question about whether he ever interviewed Knight. He said he tried, through a fellow officer who had played football with him. "Suge hung up on him," Long said.