By Jeff Burbank
Las Vegas Review-Journal
LAS VEGAS — Newly-released body-camera footage from Las Vegas police showed an alleged former gang member under investigation in the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur yelling obscenities after being placed in handcuffs and saying “I can’t breathe” after Las Vegas police executed a search warrant at his Henderson home last month.
In footage released by the Metropolitan Police Department, Duane Keith Davis is shown being taken into custody as police officers and SWAT personnel served a court-approved warrant to search and confiscate items of interest in the Tupac probe from inside his suburban home on Maple Shade Drive in Henderson on July 17.
Police confiscated many items including laptop computers, iPads, an iPhone, a hard drive, USB drive, photos, books, gun cartridges and documents related to the ownership of Davis’ house.
Police detectives were trying to locate things related to the death of Shakur that “tend to show evidence of motive and/or identity of the perpetrator,” according to the warrant.
Videos show Davis obeying police commands to come out of his garage with his hands on his head, walking backwards into the street and cooperating, before shouting profanities after officers handcuffed him for questioning.
Davis also shouted “I can’t breathe” while officers detained him.
The footage included only the time when Davis and a woman he identified as his wife came out of the house at the behest of police, who used bullhorns to get their attention. The videos did not show the actual search inside the home later that night.
Davis, 60, is an alleged gang member whose nephew, Orlando Anderson, was considered a suspect in the fatal shooting of Shakur on Sept. 7, 1996, at the intersection of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, a few blocks east of the Strip.
Shakur died six days later, but the shooter has never been caught or identified.
In the moments leading up to the shooting, Shakur had left the MGM Grand, where he watched the Mike Tyson vs. Bruce Seldon heavyweight fight, and was in a BMW driven by Death Row Records founder Suge Knight. The BMW stopped at a red light when a Cadillac drove up and a shooter fired several shots into the BMW and the Cadillac fled the scene.
Anderson, who had been in a fight with Shakur the same night the rapper was killed, died in a gang-related shooting in 1998.
Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on X.
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