Only one man survived the targeted shooting that killed late rapper Tupac Shakur. Now, he’s refusing to talk — and warning both sides not to push him. Marion “Suge” Knight, the former CEO of Death Row Records, was behind the wheel of the BMW on Sept. 7, 1996. A gunman opened fire on t he passenger seat at the corner of East Flamingo Road in Las Vegas. Shakur died six days later at 25. Suge Knight refuses to speak during Tupac Shakur’s murder trial as defendant Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who prosecutors say made the call. (Photos by Ethan Miller/Getty Images; Getty Images) Knight walked away with fragments to the head and survived. Now, with the trial finally underway in Las Vegas, he says he wants no part of it. ‘Show Me the Paperwork’: Suge Knight Fires Back at Snoop Dogg Over Death Row Ownership as Their Feud Heats Up Following Explosive Tupac Claims “This trial has nothing to do with me and if somebody brings me there, it’s gonna hurt whoever brings me there. I promise you that,” Knight told ABC News in an interview from prison last week. Knight didn’t leave the threat vague. He warned, “They make me come there against my will, if Keffe D’s lawyers bring me there, it [won’t] look good for him. If the prosecution brings me there, it won’t look good for them.” Tupac and Suge Knight had one of the most complicated relationships in hip-hop.Business partners. Friends. Brothers at times. Their story was never simple. pic.twitter.com/98Cgw5YJd6— Sound_Dealer (@bigharris1212) August 15, 2026 Knight then followed with: “Leave me out of it.” The defendant is Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63. Prosecutors charged the former Crips member with murder with a deadly weapon with intent to promote, further, or assist a criminal gang. He has pleaded not guilty since his arrest in September 2023. Davis spent years going to platforms to tell his story. He claimed that he rode in the front seat of a white Cadillac that pulled alongside Shakur’s BMW the night of the shooting. In police interviews, on camera for a documentary, and across his 2019 memoir “Compton Street Legend,” Davis wrote that he pulled out a Glock and tossed it into the back seat. His attorneys now say he spun that story for attention and a paycheck rather than confessing to anything. Jury selection opened Monday, Aug. 10, before Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny. Jurors are expected to begin hearing evidence Aug. 17, according to Courthouse News Service. The full proceeding is projected to run about four weeks. Knight isn’t the only name on the potential witness list. According to IBTimes, Prosecutors have also floated Sean “Diddy” Combs, whose Bad Boy Records sat on the opposite side of the coastal rivalry that impacted both labels. That claim runs directly into three decades of his own words. @theartofdialogue #KeefeD Disrespects #2Pac and Says #2Pac Was Break Dancing When He Was Getting Shot. #TheArtOfDialogue ♬ original sound – The Art Of Dialogue As previously reported, Davis has repeatedly described his role in interviews as well as his memoir “Compton Street Legend,” where he wrote that he allegedly supplied the gun to his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson. Knight finds the defense strategy almost insulting. “Everything he said and talked about, he already told on himself,” Knight told ABC News. “So, what are you going to do? Erase all the recordings of the interviews he did?” Davis has an answer for that, and it’s the backbone of his defense. He now says those confessions were fiction and that the memoir, the documentary sit-downs, and the interviews where he placed himself in the car were embellishments sold for attention and a check, not testimony. Honestly why even have a trial, Keefe D literally told everything that happened the night 2Pac got murdered and was laughing about it on Vlad .— Black Sheep (@ChillGodDee) August 14, 2026 Shakur and Knight had spent the evening at the MGM Grand watching Mike Tyson fight on the night leading up to the rapper’s death. In the lobby afterward, they ran into Anderson, who had allegedly taken part in a robbery over a Death Row Records pendant months earlier. Shakur and Knight jumped him. Hotel cameras caught all of it. Prosecutors say Davis and his associates spent the rest of the night hunting for payback, per NPR. Understanding why Shakur was in that car at all means understanding what Knight was to him. In 1995, Shakur was at Clinton Correctional Facility in New York on a sexual abuse conviction. At this point, he was running out of appeals and in a financial crisis. No label would touch him. But Knight would. Death Row fronted his roughly $3 million bond in exchange for a three-album deal… famously drafted on a napkin. Days after his release, Shakur was on a private jet to Los Angeles recording “All Eyez On Me.” Less than a year later, he was dead. But Knight has always framed their relationship as love. A week after the shooting, he told MTV’s Abbie Kearse that the bond ran past business, according to The Atlanta Voice: “Tupac loved Death Row. Tupac loved me. I loved him.” Others have framed it as leverage. And Davis, in his own book, argued the alliance is precisely what killed him. He wrote that Shakur mistakenly believed Knight and the Death Row crew were untouchable and would protect him, a miscalculation that dropped the rapper into L.A. gang politics. Knight, meanwhile, has his own reasons for staying quiet. The 61-year-old is serving 28 years in California for voluntary manslaughter after pleading no contest in 2018 to running over and killing Terry Carter outside a Compton burger stand. The trial is proceeding without the man in the driver’s seat after three decades of silence. Suge Knight Refuses to Take the Stand In Tupac Murder Case, Then Points the Finger at Defendant Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis ...read more read less