Tupac Murder Trial: ‘All Hell Broke Loose’ as Witness Recalls Rapper’s Shooting

A witness to the fatal shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur has described the chaos that followed the gunfire, telling a Las Vegas court that “all hell broke loose” on the night of the 1996 attack. Ingrid Stokes, who was travelling in a car near Shakur’s vehicle, said she and her friends were heading to the same nightclub when they heard the shots. She said she did not see who was inside the vehicle that opened fire.

Stokes also told the court that she was reluctant to provide information to police because she feared being labelled a “snitch”. She said officers who later questioned her were rude and treated her and her friends like suspects. The testimony came as the trial of Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, began in Las Vegas nearly 30 years after Shakur was killed. Davis has pleaded not guilty to murder with a deadly weapon. Prosecutors accuse him of organising the shooting in retaliation for an earlier confrontation involving his nephew, Orlando Anderson, and Shakur’s entourage.

Prosecutors acknowledge that Davis was not the gunman, but allege that he helped plan the attack, obtained the weapon and coordinated the group involved. They are relying heavily on Davis’s past public statements and his 2019 memoir, in which he described his alleged involvement. The defence argues that the prosecution’s case is based largely on unreliable statements and that investigators failed to produce enough physical evidence after decades of investigation. The trial is expected to last several weeks and could finally bring a courtroom examination of one of hip hop’s most enduring unsolved murders.