Las Vegas police have arrested a man for the 1996 drive-by shooting of Tupac Shakur, a long-awaited break for one of the most infamous unsolved murders in hip-hop history. Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who has described himself as one of the last living witnesses of the shooting, was taken into custody early Friday morning after he was indicted by a grand jury for one count of murder with a deadly weapon, Marc DiGiacomo, the Clark county prosecutor, said in court on Friday. He was arrested while on a walk near his home in Henderson, a Las Vegas suburb. DiGiacomo said the grand jury heard evidence in the case for several months, and alleged that Davis acted as the “on-ground, on-site commander” who “ordered the death” of Shakur. Davis, whose late nephew Orlando Anderson was considered a suspect in Shakur’s murder, has long been known to investigators. He admitted in interviews and in his 2019 tell-all memoir, Compton Street Legend, that he was in the white Cadillac from which gunfire erupted during the September 1996 shooting. Shakur was 25 years old and died from his wounds six days later. Davis was a leader of the South Side Crips gang and wrote in his book about running a “multimillion-dollar nationwide drug empire”. “It has often been said that justice delayed is justice denied,” Steve Wolfson, the Clark county district attorney, told the Associated Press after the hearing. “In this case, justice has been delayed, but justice won’t be denied.” The arrest comes two months after Las Vegas police raided the home of Davis’s wife, Paula Clemons, on 17 July in Henderson. Documents said police were looking for items “concerning the murder of Tupac Shakur”. Police reported collecting multiple computers, a cellphone and hard drive, a Vibe magazine that featured Shakur, several .40-caliber bullets, two “tubs containing photographs” and a copy of Compton Street Legend. It wasn’t immediately clear if Davis had an attorney, and he hasn’t responded to the AP’s repeated requests for comment since the raid. In an interview in March, Davis was asked if he was worried about being prosecuted or facing a life sentence. “If they want to put me in jail, that’s just something I gotta do. It’s not like I’m scared of jail or nothing,” he responded, noting he has previously been incarcerated. In the book, Davis said he broke his silence over Tupac’s killing in 2010 during a closed-door meeting with federal and local authorities. At the time, he was 46 and facing life in prison on drug charges. “They promised they would shred the indictment and stop the grand jury if I helped them out,” he wrote. Shakur was gunned down on 7 September 1996 after attending a Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand Hotel. The rapper was involved in a scuffle with Anderson and several others in the hotel lobby; three hours later, while he was headed to an afterparty with Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight in a convoy of about 10 cars, another car pulled up next to Shakur’s BMW waiting at a red light and opened fire. Shakur was shot four times. Immediately following the shooting, the rapper Yaki Kadafi, who had been in the car directly behind Shakur, told police the assailants were driving a white Cadillac and that he could identify the killer. Las Vegas police failed to follow up on the lead. Kadafi was shot and killed in an unrelated incident in New York two months later. In 2018, after a cancer diagnosis, Davis admitted publicly in an interview for a BET show to being inside the Cadillac during the attack. He implicated his nephew, Anderson, saying he was one of two people in the backseat where the shots had been fired. Anderson denied any involvement in the Shakur shooting. He died in 1998 in a shooting in Compton, California. Shakur’s death came as his fourth solo album, All Eyez on Me, remained on the charts, with some 5m copies sold. Nominated six times for a Grammy award, Shakur is largely considered one of the most influential and versatile rappers of all time. Shakur was feuding at the time with rap rival Biggie Smalls, also known as the Notorious BIG, who was fatally shot in March 1997. At the time, both rappers were in the middle of an east coast-west coast rivalry that primarily defined the hip-hop scene during the mid-1990s. Greg Kading, a retired Los Angeles police detective who spent years investigating the Shakur killing and wrote a book about it, said he would not be surprised by Davis’s indictment and arrest. “It’s so long overdue,” Kading told theAP during a recent interview. “People have been yearning for him to be arrested for a long time. It’s never been unsolved in our minds. It’s been unprosecuted.” Kading said he interviewed Davis in 2008 and 2009, during Los Angeles police investigations of the killings of Shakur in Las Vegas and the killing of Biggie Smalls. He said he also talked with a Las Vegas police detective about the case, including after the Swat raid in July at the home in Henderson. Kading believed the investigation gained new momentum in recent years following Davis’s public descriptions of his role in the killing, including in Compton Street Legend. “It’s those events that have given Las Vegas the ammunition and the leverage to move forward,” Kading said. “Prior to Keffe D’s public declarations, the cases were unprosecutable as they stood. “He put himself squarely in the middle of the conspiracy,” Kading said of Davis and the Shakur killing. “He had acquired the gun, he had given the gun to the shooter and he had been present in the vehicle when they hunted down and located both Tupac and Suge [Knight].” Kading noted that Davis is the last living person among the four people who were in the vehicle from which shots were fired at Shakur and Knight. Others were Anderson, Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown and DeAndre “Freaky” Smith. “It’s a concerted effort of conspirators,” Kading said, adding that he believed that because the killing was premeditated, Davis could face a first-degree murder charge. “All the other direct conspirators or participants are all dead,” Kading said. “Keffe D is the last man standing among the individuals that conspired to kill Tupac.”