The first week of the trial of Duane Keith Davis, who is accused of orchestrating the shooting of the rapper Tupac Shakur, drew to a close on Friday in Las Vegas, nearly 30 years after Mr. Shakur’s death.
Mr. Davis, 63, who had once been mired in the high-stakes world of hip-hop and gang violence in Compton, Calif., in the 1990s, is accused of acquiring the gun used to shoot Mr. Shakur the night of Sept. 7, 1996.
Prosecutors allege that he and three associates cruised down a street in a white Cadillac as they pursued Mr. Shakur, who was headed to a club. While Mr. Davis is not charged with firing the gun, prosecutors say he was instrumental in the shooting. His own comments in a book he wrote about his life as a gang member in Compton contributed to the decision to prosecute him.
Mr. Davis has pleaded not guilty to one count of murder with the use of a deadly weapon. The jury has heard from more than a dozen witnesses, and the trial is expected to last about a month.
Here are five takeaways from the first week.
Vivid details emerged of a night 30 years ago.
Garry Dale, a retired member of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, testified that minutes before the shooting he stopped the BMW carrying Mr. Shakur and his associate Marion Knight, known as Suge. He later sat in an ambulance with Mr. Shakur, who refused to divulge the identities of his assailants.
Ingrid Stokes, one of four women in a car following Mr. Shakur to a club, recalled being feet away from Mr. Shakur’s vehicle when “all hell broke loose.” She said she frantically tried to flee during the gunfire and did not see who pulled the trigger, acknowledging there was still fear about speaking about that evening: “Snitches get stitches.”
Detectives describe Mr. Davis’s first encounters with the police.
Within a few hours of the shooting, another former officer testified, the Police Department was on the lookout for four men in a light-colored Cadillac. But as law enforcement assembled in Nevada, Mr. Davis and others rushed back to Compton, where hostilities between rival gangs would escalate. In 1997, another hip-hop star, Christopher Wallace, known as Biggie, was shot and killed after a party.
Mr. Davis had appeared in a photo lineup put together by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department as a potential suspect in Mr. Shakur’s murder, but not until Mr. Wallace was killed did he have his first encounters with any of the authorities investigating the deaths.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Police Department that was played for the jury, Mr. Davis recalled standing in a parking garage after the party when he heard people shouting that Mr. Wallace had been shot. Mr. Davis was later cleared of any suspicion.
Mr. Knight’s associates spoke of simmering tensions.
Former associates of Mr. Knight described the intricacies of a war between gangs and hip-hop record companies. For at least a year, Death Row Records, a company co-founded by Mr. Knight that was aligned with the Mob Piru Bloods, was in conflict with Sean Combs’s record company in New York and the South Side Compton Crips. Mr. Davis was a member of the Crips.
Surveillance footage played in court showed a group of people including Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight punch and kick Orlando Anderson, Mr. Davis’s nephew, the night of the shooting. According to James McDonald, a member of the Bloods, Mr. Davis and Mr. Anderson were among those subsequently targeted during the gang war in Compton. “Pac was shot, retaliation was a must,” he said under cross-examination by Mr. Davis’s lawyer, Michael Sanft.
Reggie Wright Jr., the owner of a security company with which Mr. Knight worked closely, told the jury that a member of his security team assigned to guard Mr. Shakur did not show up. After hearing about the shooting, Mr. Wright called his father, a member of the Compton Police Department, to warn that there would be “trouble.”
Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wright denied being involved in the shooting. As Mr. McDonald left the stand, he addressed Mr. Davis directly, reiterating that he was testifying because of a court order. “Even though we don’t like each other, I don’t want to send you to prison,” he had told Mr. Davis earlier.
Detectives said that Mr. Davis’s story emerged under pressure.
It took more than 10 years for law enforcement to hear the story that prosecutors say is the truth about what happened that night.
A former Los Angeles Police Department detective recalled his shock upon hearing Mr. Davis say that while he was not involved in Mr. Wallace’s murder, “we did the other one.” In December 2008, the detective, Daryn Dupree, and other law enforcement members met with Mr. Davis and his lawyer. Mr. Davis told them that after the attack on his nephew, they went looking for those responsible.
In a recording, jurors heard Mr. Davis recall how he, Mr. Anderson and two others had pulled up beside Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight’s vehicle. Realizing he would have difficulty shooting from his vantage point in the passenger seat, he passed the gun to the back. Mr. Anderson pulled the trigger after another man got cold feet, Mr. Davis says in the recording.
Mr. Davis also said that he had been hired by Mr. Combs, who was feuding with Death Row, to kill Mr. Knight and Mr. Shakur. Mr. Combs, who is serving a prison sentence on a prostitution-related conviction, has long denied any connection to Mr. Shakur’s death.
Mr. Sanft, the defense lawyer, said the prosecution’s case was “fiction.” Mr. Dupree acknowledged that Mr. Davis told his story to detectives after they had acquired enough information to arrest him on narcotics charges, and that they had used that as leverage in the hopes he would give them information related to Mr. Wallace’s murder.
The defendant addressed the judge.
Defendants typically rely on their lawyers to speak for them in court, but Mr. Davis directly addressed Judge Carli Kierny on Friday with concerns about the effect of the high-profile case on his family. He said his house, his car and his wife’s car had all been vandalized as a result of his address being made public during the court proceedings.
“This stuff is wrong,” he told the judge.
“You’re endangering my family’s life,” he then told Marc DiGiacomo, a prosecutor on the case.
Mr. DiGiacomo said it seemed as though Mr. Davis were upset that he was on trial for murder. Judge Kierny told Mr. Davis she had heard of “concerns both ways.” She told the prosecutors to keep their witnesses in line and the defense to ensure Mr. Davis was not communicating with anyone he should not be.
Julia Jacobs contributed reporting.
