LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — A former detective said Keefe D's recent interviews about Tupac Shakur gave the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department an open door for a court-authorized warrant.
Greg Kading, a former Los Angeles Police Department detective, talked to Channel 13 about the new development in the nearly 27-year-old murder case.
Monday, Las Vegas police and SWAT approached a Henderson home with a search warrant. Residents on Maple Shade Street recall hearing loud noises, bullhorns and seeing lights.
MORE: Residents of Henderson neighborhood react to home being searched in Tupac investigation
Tuesday, an official told ABC News that investigators started looking into the case again after Neflix aired "Unsolved: The Tupac and Biggie Murders" in 2018 and a book called "Compton Street Legend" published in 2019.
From the home, police gathered laptops, articles and computers about Shakur and his death.
On the night of September 7, 1996, Duane Keith "Keefe D" Davis and his nephew, Orlando Anderson, alongside other gang members known as the "Southside Crips" were in Las Vegas to see a Mike Tyson fight.
"Anderson had previously been involved in a conflict with members of Death Row's entourage and members of a gang called the Mob Piru, affiliated with Death Row Records. And an individual named Trevon Lane had his death row medallions stolen from him at a mall during a beef between the Crips and the Bloods, and Trayvon Lane was in Vegas with Tupac," Kading said. "He pointed out across the lobby was one of the guys that stole his chain."
That's when Tupac punched Anderson, and the events of Tupac's murder set into motion, according to Kading.
Kading says his investigation identified Anderson as the shooter.
Police believe Anderson got a gun and drove up to a BMW that Shakur was in. The vehicle was stopped at a red light at Flamingo Road and Koval Lane when shots rang out.
"After the shooting, they fled," Kading said. "They put the car somewhere, stashed the gun, and then just went about their business in Las Vegas as if nothing had happened, really."
He said Anderson's uncle, Davis, confessed to police he was there in Las Vegas and that he gave his nephew the gun.
"The strength of the lead was really based on Keefe D's confession about being involved in the murder and giving a gun to his nephew Orlando," Kading told Channel 13 in a previous interview.
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Anderson was killed in an unrelated shooting in Los Angeles two years after Shakur.
Kading said LAPD was investigating the shooting of Christopher Wallace, famously known as rapper Notorious B.I.G. Keefe D was a suspect in the case as the Southside Crips were at the Peterson Auto Museum the night Wallace was shot.
Kading said to get Keefe D to provide more information to police about the shooting of Tupac, they made a proffer agreement in 2009 — meaning that police would not hold self-incriminating statements against him.
"He was facing a 25-year minimum mandatory sentence on a drug case that we had built against him, that we had built that case specifically against him to compel him to cooperate in the murder investigations," he said.
However, in recent years, Kading said Keefe D started to "boast publicly" about the murder of Tupac, and those statements were separate from his agreement with police.
"Eventually, we went to interview him about that, and that led to his confession to the murder of Tupac Shakur," Kading said. "He's out there boasting about it, and none of these confessions he's making are protected under his previous agreement. So it opened up the door for [police] now to pursue him, to prosecute him."
Kading believes that police opened Shakur's case again because of a proactive LVMPD investigator.
"Sometimes all it takes is a proactive investigator who thinks he has enough to continue to investigate actively," he said. "And so that's what led to the search warrants."
Kading is hopeful that reopening the case could set the record straight and close it.
"This is just a case that took a long time to resolve," he said. "I think that that's going to be huge, will make a huge impact not only in the hip hop community and the African-American community but the law enforcement community, too. Everybody is going to benefit because we're making a declaration that, in fact, this is what happened."
