The defense attorney who represented Duane “Keffe D” Davis in the trial over rapper Tupac Shakur’s murder was found dead at his home on Friday, aged 55, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Michael Sanft, a Las Vegas attorney, died just weeks after his client was found guilty and sentenced to 40 years to life in prison for orchestrating the 1996 shooting that killed Shakur.
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Shakur was shot dead in the passenger seat of an SUV driven by his record company executive, Marion “Suge” Knight. Until Davis’s arrest in 2023, the killing had remained one of America’s most notorious unsolved cases for nearly three decades.
The murder silenced one of rap’s most commercially successful and influential artists. It reinforced the image of violence surrounding 1990s hip-hop culture and fueled the era’s infamous East Coast-West Coast “gangsta” rap rivalry.
A jury convicted Davis of organizing the murder in retaliation for Shakur and members of the rapper’s entourage beating his nephew inside the MGM Grand casino on the Las Vegas Strip on September 7, 1996. Davis has said he will appeal his conviction.
It is not yet known how Sanft died, although Las Vegas police said the death did not appear suspicious.
