Witness refuses to implicate defendant in Tupac murder trial, citing street code

James McDonald sat in the witness box on Tuesday morning, visibly uncomfortable, his arms crossed against questions he did not want to answer. The man on trial for Tupac Shakur's murder—Duane "Keffe D" Davis—sat across the courtroom in a suit, stone-faced, while McDonald wrestled with a conflict that runs deeper than the law: the street code that forbids cooperation with authorities, even when you're under oath and threatened with contempt of court.

McDonald, a former enforcer at Death Row Records and member of the Mob Piru gang, had been forced to take the stand. He made clear from the start that he resented being there. When Davis's defense attorney Michael Sanft pressed him repeatedly about who was responsible for Shakur's death, McDonald's frustration boiled over. "You're asking me something that wouldn't be good for him," he said, pointing at Davis. "I'm not going to send him to prison, you are." He raised his voice and his arms, telling Sanft he didn't want to answer questions that could hurt the defendant. At one point, looking directly at Davis, he said: "I don't want to send him to prison, even though we don't like each other."

The tension in that moment captures something about this case that goes far beyond the courtroom. Shakur was gunned down in a drive-by shooting on a Las Vegas street on September 7, 1996—thirty years ago this month—just twenty-five years old, shot after a Mike Tyson boxing match. The murder has haunted American culture ever since, one of the most famous unsolved killings in the country's history. Prosecutors allege that Davis, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips, orchestrated the shooting after his nephew Orlando Anderson got into a fight with Shakur hours earlier. They argue Davis believed the attack on his nephew could not go unanswered. But the case has always been shadowed by the street code that dominated the 1990s hip-hop scene—a code that said you don't talk to police, you don't cooperate with authorities, you handle things yourself. Shakur himself, bleeding in an ambulance after he was shot, refused to tell a police officer what happened. "We'll take care of it," he said instead. He died six days later without ever identifying his shooter.

McDonald testified that he was not present when Shakur was shot. But he acknowledged that those who were there—members of Shakur's entourage—had quickly communicated who was responsible. "It was a gang war," he said. "People were getting hurt. People were being sought." He described Davis and his nephew as being in the middle of that conflict, targets themselves. When his testimony ended, McDonald addressed Davis directly: "What you are going through brother is what you going through. I don't want to be a part of it."

Another witness, Reggie Wright Jr., who was part of Shakur's security detail and later became general manager of Death Row Records, also testified on Tuesday. Davis's defense team suggested that Wright, a former Compton police officer, might be the real culprit. They questioned him about his growing role at Death Row Records after Suge Knight—who was in the car with Shakur when he was shot—left the label. The implication was clear: Wright's position and influence expanded significantly after Knight's departure, and the label itself was valued at three million dollars.

Davis himself had actually brought much of this case into the open. Years after the shooting, he made public statements about it and co-authored a memoir in which he claimed to be a passenger in the vehicle that fired into Shakur's car and said he had supplied the gun. But he has since distanced himself from those claims, saying he didn't write all of the memoir and that parts were fictionalised to boost sales. The trial is expected to continue, but McDonald's testimony on Tuesday illustrated the central obstacle prosecutors face: a witness who knows things, who is under oath, who has been threatened with contempt, and who still refuses to break a code that has held for three decades.