In 2008 and 2009 police interviews, Tupac Shakur murder suspect Duane “Keefe D” Davis made claims about Sean “Diddy” Combs’ involvement — which Combs has long denied

Nearly three decades ago, around 11 p.m. on September 7, 1996, Marion “Suge” Knight — then the 31-year-old CEO of Death Row Records and one of the most feared kingpins in the music business — drove a black BMW 750 sedan east through Las Vegas, a block off the strip.

In the passenger seat sat rapper Tupac Shakur aka 2Pac, just 25, whose cultural footprint had already eclipsed his multi-platinum catalog. Dressed in a Versace shirt and gleaming gold chain, Shakur was still out on bond, still basking in the glow of stardom, brushing off a violent altercation with a Crip gang member inside a Sin City casino that had transpired just hours earlier after a Mike Tyson boxing match.

Trailing behind Knight and Shakur was the Death Row convoy of about ten cars that snaked through traffic like shadows. Then, at the corner of Flamingo and Koval, beneath the buzz of the Strip’s neon haze, a white, late-model Cadillac pulled up alongside.

Tupac Shakur and Marion Suge Knight.

According to Las Vegas prosecutors’ July 2024 filings, South Side Compton Crips member Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson didn’t have the correct angle to shoot. This came after a separate court filing in December described him as the alleged shooter.

Anderson allegedly handed the semiautomatic .40 Glock to fellow gang member Deandre “Big Dre” Smith, who opened fire from the backseat of the vehicle — 13 shots in total. Four bullets struck Shakur in the chest, arm and thigh. Knight was grazed in the head by shrapnel but survived. Shakur, who had worn a bulletproof vest regularly, was not wearing one that night.

Sean Combs (left) Suge Knight (center) and Tupac Shakur (right).

Inside the BMW, Tupac’s unreleased 1997 track “Never Had a Friend Like Me” was playing, Knight recalls. Speaking from California’s Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, where he is serving 28 years for a fatal hit-and-run, Knight, now, 60, reflected on the moment that altered everything as the only living witness to the deadly shooting.

“Tupac is my favorite person in the world. It was a part of me that changed my life forever,” he says, voice quivering. “He didn’t have to die. A part of me died when he died.”

For nearly 30 years, no one was held accountable for Shakur’s murder. The shooting occurred on one of the most surveilled intersections in America, amid surging tensions between rival gang-affiliated record labels. Many have pointed to a deeper reason the case went cold: an unwillingness to cross lines of influence, power and fear that ran far beyond music.

A booking photo of Duane “Keefe D” Davis.

But in September 2023, the tides finally turned. Duane “Keefe D” Davis — a former Crips leader and the last known living suspect from the infamous white Cadillac that night — was arrested and charged with orchestrating the hit. Prosecutors allege Davis played point man in the murder that’s haunted hip-hop for decades.

Inside the Murder Allegations — and Diddy’s Alleged Role

Months later, in a bombshell court filing dated July 18, 2024, the Clark County District Attorney’s office revealed a long-buried 2009 police interview in which Davis, speaking as a former confidential informant for two years, not only allegedly detailed his own role in the killing — but repeatedly pointed the finger at music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, then known as Puffy, as the man who allegedly ordered Tupac Shakur’s assassination.

Davis accused Combs of being enraged by Tupac’s relentless taunts.

The DEA and U.S. Department of Justice also released a report about a 2008 interview in which Davis claimed Combs said he “needed to get rid of Knight and Shakur” and offered Davis $1 million to “handle the problem.”

Sean “Diddy” Combs (left), Rapper Tupac Shakur (right).

Knight, still grappling with it all, doesn’t mince words: “I end up with a bullet an inch into my skull, but at the same time, everybody knows where a million dollars came from,” he says, pausing momentarily. “Like what would Pac want? What he really want is truth. I believe that if something smells like sh–, look like sh–, it’s sh–.”

Sean “Diddy” Combs attends Howard University on October 20, 2023.Shareif Ziyadat/Getty

Combs has long vehemently denied any role in the shooting, and a public information officer for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told PEOPLE on July 24, 2024. “Sean Combs has never been considered a suspect in the Tupac Shakur homicide investigation.” He has never been charged in connection to the murder. Combs is currently facing serious unrelated federal charges, including sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution. His fate will be decided by twelve jurors in the coming weeks in the Southern District of New York.

Davis, who pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, remains in custody awaiting trial, which is now delayed until February 9, 2026. His defense claims new witness testimony could place him outside of Vegas and 300 miles away in Los Angeles during the time of the incident. But prosecutors continue to cite his own confessions, most notably his 2019 memoir Compton Street Legend.

Knight’s Final Hours with Tupac

Back in ‘96 in Vegas, after shots were fired, Knight — bleeding from his scalp — made a frantic U-turn and headed west at a high speed toward Las Vegas Boulevard. Meanwhile, two patrol officers on an unrelated call nearby had heard the gunfire and called for backup. They chased down the BMW, which had two blown tires. Once stopped, officers called for medical assistance.

“I got out and tried to tell the officers what happened while I was bleeding everywhere,” says Knight. “Also, I then was getting Tupac out the car, even when the door was open. I had to go over there bleeding everywhere, take the seat belt off him. When we get into the ambulance, Pac is funny as f—. He cracking jokes. I’m cracking jokes. Pac’s like, ‘Sh–, when we heal up, you know what we doing.’ That type of sh–.” The ambulance transported them to the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada.

At the hospital, Knight was treated for minor injuries and released while Shakur was listed in critical condition. “When I came to see him, Pac was sitting up talking. He [allegedly] said, ‘Well, look. One, bring me a blunt. Matter of fact, bring me two blunts.’ And I said, ‘You going to smoke in the hospital?’ He [allegedly] said, ‘Yeah, I am.’”

Knight chuckles softly recalling that moment — Tupac joking, allegedly requesting Hennessy too. Knight says Shakur grabbed him closer, as Knight kissed him on his forehead, and the two said, “I love you” to each other. But that joy cracked under the weight of what came next.

Before the second of two emergency surgeries, including one to remove Shakur’s right lung to stop internal bleeding, he made a chilling request. As he lay in his hospital bed, fading in and out of consciousness, Knight claims Shakur allegedly turned to him, desperately begging to be killed. He spoke with eerie clarity, suggesting they could even capture it on camera, that he’d record a will or even lay down a song explaining everything. It wouldn’t matter, Shakur said. The world would still make Knight pay the ultimate price for it.

Knight recalls them both laughing, but beneath the nervous laughter was a hard truth: Shakur believed he was going to be sent back to prison once the chaos subsided, a payback for the brutal casino beatdown caught on security footage hours before the brutal shooting.

Prison, to Tupac, wasn’t just a fear — it was a fate he believed was worse than death. “I’ll die before I go back,” he allegedly told those around him. Still, suicide was off the table. According to Knight, he believed taking his own life would bar him from heaven, a line he wouldn’t cross. So instead, he turned to his crew — and then to Knight. “Kill me. Shoot me,” he urged. Knight says he refused. “No, Pac. We can’t do it.”

Tupac Shakur and his mother Afeni Shakur.Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images; Frank Mullen/WireImage

In the haze of hospital lights, beeping monitors and heartbreak, Knight claims Shakur made a final, desperate request to his mother, Afeni: let him go.

According to Knight, who was by the rapper’s side as he lay wracked with pain and failing fast, Shakur pleaded with his mother to help him end his life. Knight claims she allegedly gave him pills in an attempt to honor his wishes.

“The doctors came in and brought him back,” Knight recalls. “And his mom [allegedly] said, ‘Don’t ever do that again. If he’s having complications, don’t touch him. Don’t bring him back. Let him go.’” It was a mother’s raw act of mercy, Knight says — a final promise to her son to respect his suffering.

Doctors, trying to relieve pressure on his battered body, reportedly placed Shakur in a medically-induced coma and hooked him to a respirator, according to Knight. But the damage was irreversible. On September 13, at 4:03 p.m., Shakur was pronounced dead.

Afeni Shakur in Philadelphia in September 1970.Photo by David Fenton/Getty Images

What followed, Knight claims, was as surreal and raw as Tupac himself. Immediately after his death, Knight says Afeni, who died at age 60 in May 2016, turned to him and insisted her son be cremated, right then and there. “She came up to me and said, ‘Get it done. Now,’” Knight remembers.

“I told her, ‘Look, I don’t know if I can do that.’” He said he hesitated not out of defiance, but because Shakur, just weeks earlier, had allegedly laid out a different vision for his send-off. They had talked about it in the studio. “He told me, ‘When I go, I want every rapper at my funeral to grab the mic. I want them to kiss me head to toe. Just like in ‘Life Goes On.’” Knight pauses. “He didn’t want to be cremated.”

But Afeni wouldn’t hear it. “She gave me one of those mama looks, like, ‘Shut your a– up and do what I said.’ Then she started cussing me out. ‘Get this sh– done!’” Knight says. He did what she asked. “I paid someone a million dollars cash to take care of it.”

Later that night, a circle of Shakur’s closest friends gathered to honor him the way they believed he would’ve wanted. The bag containing Tupac’s cremated ashes was passed around. Some, allegedly, were rolled into a blunt and smoked.

“I was so happy to say I was on probation — I couldn’t smoke,” Knight says. “I told his mother, ‘Moms, I’d love to, but if I hit that, I’ll get in trouble.’” He laughs. “I was probably the only one who didn’t hit him.”

Tupac: Convicted Felon, Street Prophet

Shakur came into the world already bearing the weight of revolution. His lyrics dripped with pain, purpose and paranoia — songs about “thug life,” desperation and street justice that read like dispatches from the front lines of America’s forgotten neighborhoods. But for all his fire and charisma, Shakur was, at his core, a troubled and sensitive soul. He spent his early years ricocheting through one inner-city zip code after another, chasing stability that never came.

By the time the spotlight found him, Tupac had already become a walking contradiction: platinum-selling poet, convicted felon, street prophet, media pariah. Shakur’s fourth album, All Eyez on Me, was climbing the charts again and had sold nearly 3 million copies, while his previous release, 1995’s Me Against the World, sold 2 million copies.

He appeared in three movies: Juice (1992), Poetic Justice (1993) and Above the Rim (1994) and just wrapped two 1997 films—Gridlock’d and Gang Related, in which he played a detective. Since ’91, he’d been arrested eight times. He served eight months in prison for a sexual abuse conviction in 1994 and was named in two wrongful-death lawsuits — one involving a 6-year-old boy caught in the crossfire between Shakur’s crew and rivals in Northern California in Marin City in 1992. It was settled for an undisclosed amount in November 1995.

Still, nothing could match the chaos that followed his death.

Rumors ignited within hours: who pulled the trigger, who ordered the hit, who knew more than they were saying. In a 179-page court filing submitted in 2024, prosecutors finally unpacked years of whispers and street talk in granular detail, laying out an explosive account of what allegedly happened before, during and after that fateful night in Las Vegas.