Marion "Suge" Knight says he does not want to testify in the Tupac Shakur murder trial and wants to be left out of it as jury selection starts Monday in Las Vegas. From prison, he said the case "has nothing to do with me" and warned, "Leave me out of it."
The timing matters because Knight is the only living eyewitness to the drive-by assassination of Tupac Shakur, and prosecutors are trying to convict Duane "Keffe D" Davis nearly three decades after the shooting. Knight said he still refuses to cooperate with law enforcement and added, "I don't get paid to solve homicides."
That makes his position central to the trial before it even starts. Davis is accused of murder for allegedly giving his crew the order to open fire on Shakur in retaliation for a fight, and Knight's account sits at the center of that case whether he appears in court or not.
On the night of Sept. 7, 1996, Knight and Shakur were in Las Vegas for the Mike Tyson fight Bruce Seldon bout at the MGM Grand. After the fight, Shakur and Knight encountered Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson in a casino lobby, and Knight led Death Row Records. The two men confronted Anderson and jumped him in a beatdown caught on hotel security cameras.
Detectives have said Davis and his companions went looking for Shakur after that beating. Authorities claim they waited at a Las Vegas night spot run at the time by Knight, and soon after they left, the car in which Davis was allegedly riding pulled alongside the red BMW Knight was driving. At a stoplight at East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, Shakur and Knight were shot. Knight was injured in the hail of bullets, and Shakur died six days later after being rushed to the hospital in grave condition.
The friction now is simple. Knight says he will not cooperate, and he also says he does not want to be brought to court. "They make me come there against my will, if Keffe D's lawyers bring me there, it don't look good for him. If the prosecution brings me there, it don't look good for them," he said. He also said, "You have people who wasn't there, wasn't in the car, but they're telling the story."
That leaves the trial with a witness who may be indispensable in theory and unavailable in practice. Knight is serving an unrelated 28-year sentence in California for voluntary manslaughter from a 2015 fatal hit-and-run in Los Angeles, and authorities did not arrest Davis until September 2023. The case sat without charges for years, and Monday will show whether Knight is called, kept away, or becomes the trial's most difficult witness without ever taking the stand.
