In 1996, Tupac Shakur was shot in a drive-by ambush in Las Vegas. He was only 25 years old and already one of the biggest artists in the US.
He had just released a huge album, All Eyez on Me, which spawned two No 1 singles. He’d worked with some of hip-hop’s greatest stars. He’d starred in Hollywood films. It seemed he could do anything. And then, he died.
For 30 years, no one was held to account for his murder. Meanwhile, his legend only grew, along with the conspiracies surrounding his death.
Then, on Monday afternoon, in a Las Vegas court, came a resolution – of sorts: the news that Duane Keith Davis had been found guilty of the murder of Shakur.
The journalist Jessica Hill has been covering the case. She says there was little physical evidence of Davis’s wrongdoing. Instead, there were the accounts he had given himself – in books, podcasts and interviews – about his actions on the night. But although Davis was convicted of murder, he is not believed to be the person who pulled the trigger on the night Shakur was killed.
William Shaw had met and interviewed Shakur, and remembers an erudite, multi-talented 25-year-old with a rich cultural life. His death, he says, should be seen in the context of the terrible situation in Los Angeles at the time. “It was about this terrible situation of massive drug sales going on, which was funding massive ongoing violence. And then this fact that this community was incredibly historically maltreated.”
