The hearing has now ended for the day, and Judge Carli Kierney said proceedings would begin again at 1 pm Las Vegas time tomorrow.

James Wright Jr, a former Compton police officer who later led security for Suge Knight’s Death Row Records, said the called his father, a Compton police officer, a few times the night of Shakur’s shooting, telling him what had happened and warning him that it might affect gang dynamics in Compton.

Based on what he had heard that night, Wright testified, he understood that Shakur and Knight had “they got into it in at the MGM with some guys from the Southside Crips” and “There’s going to be trouble in Compton.”

The next witness is Reggie Wright Jr., the former Death Row Records security chief that James McDonald, the previous witness, mentioned in his testimony.

Wright testified that he, like his father, was a police officer in Compton, and that he took a medical retirement from the police department in 1996. He described himself as “head of security” for Death Row Records, a role he held even during his last few years as a police officer. Death Row Records’ founder, Marion “Suge” Knight, a man he had grown up with since elementary school.

He and Knight had grown up about two blocks away from each other, in what was considered “Mob Piru” gang territory by the time Wright was a teenager, he said.

He had “heard of” Duane “Keefe D” Davis while he was a Compton police officer, but he did not know him personally, Wright said.

“At one point he was known as a crackhead, but then later on Keefe was known as a drug dealer…[I] didn’t really enforce on the level of narcotics he was working,” Wright said.

McDonald confirmed once again that he had been subpoenaed and ordered to appear at the trial in Nevada.

“All that running and living a different life, I ain’t doing it. So I agreed to come,” McDonald said.

“Treat me as a hostile witness,” he repeated. “I’m not finna send him to prison. You are,” he told Davis’ lawyer.

“You’re asking me something that wouldn’t be good for him,” Davis said again.

A former associate of Death Row Records co-founder Suge Knight, James McDonald, grew heated on the stand under cross-examination from defense attorney Michael Sanft, and told the court that he was worried that the attorney’s questions would hurt his own client, Duane “Keefe D” Davis, who is on trial for Tupac Shakur’s murder.

“Do I answer this?” McDonald exclaimed at one point, looking towards the judge.

“You asking something that’s going to hurt this dude,” McDonald then told Sanft, declining again to go into detail about the tensions in Compton in the weeks after the evening when Davis’ nephew Orlando Anderson was in a Las Vegas hotel, and Tupac Shakur was then shot.

“Let me stop,” McDonald went on, putting both hands behind his head and blowing out a breath.

“When we got back to Compton, it was a gang war. People were getting hurt,” McDonald went on. “People were getting hurt. People was being sought. People were looking for certain individulas from his neighborhood as well they did mine. But Orlando, him [gesturing to Davis] and certain other people were being soughted, because people wanted to kill them.”

“Sure. Were they the only ones that they wanted to kill?” Sanft asked.

“I’don’t even want to open this in here--No, they weren’t the only ones. It’s his neighborhood in particular. But they were the main subjects of a gang war. They was in the middle,” McDonald said.

“…they were involved in what?” Sanft

“In the murder of Tupac,” McDonald exclaimed. He then waved his arms in apparent frustration at Davis’ attorney’s questions.

“Talk to your lawyer, man, this dude is tripping,” McDonald said, refusing to clarify who exactly was present at Tupac’s shooting and then told people in Compton what had happened.

James McDonald, the former associate of Death Row Records co-founder Suge Knight, is now being cross-examined by a defense attorney for Duane “Keefe D” Davis.

McDonald, who said he was working as head of security for Knight’s Club 662 on the night Shakur was shot, is now answering questions about the size of the club and where the Las Vegas police were in relation to the club—posted outside, not inside, and not there at the request of Reggie Wright, then head of security for Death Row Records, McDonald said.

Asked how many people were on his payroll that night, McDonald said. “Y’all do paperwork differently from we did,” prompting another laugh from the courtroom. “Our paperwork was in cash money. Our paperwork was what they call under the table. We had at least 30, 40 of my homeboys there.” They were separate from the security people Reggie Wright Jr. hired, McDonald said. “My security did what they ain’t going to do…The police going to walk you out of there. We going to drag you out of there.”

McDonald confirmed he was not present when Shakur was shot. “People that went to the scene, and everybody said Tupac was talking, so everybody came back to the club saying he was going to be alright.”

Pivoting from McDonald’s refusal to answer questions about Orlando Anderson, chief deputy district attorney Binu Palal said he would not asked McDonald if it was true that Tupac Shakur “knocked you out one time.”

“I’d have killed him,” McDonald testified. “I’m being honest with you and everybody else. I said it on my podcast show. Him, Suge, and my brother, I’d have shot all three of them if he touched me. That’s how I was living. That’s what I was back then.”

“You don’t have a choice,” McDonald went on. “You would have to go back home and fight everybody that called you a punk.”

“When I was living that life, it wasn’t no if ands or buts, it wasn’t no ‘oh you get a pass,’ no, I would have shot him. To be honest,’” McDonald said.

McDonald said he had been concerned on the night of 7 September about individuals creating problems at Club 662, and “with Crips, period.”

During McDonald’s testimony,

That night, Reggie Wright Jr., the security chief for Death Row Records, stayed at club 662 to “watch me” while others went to the Mike Tyson fight, McDonald testified.

“People was coming back and explaining that Tupac and Suge just got shot. Everyone was in an uproar.”

“Suge came back with a little bandage on his head…He was grazed, a little scar, nothing penetrating.”

That night, people thought Tupac was going to be okay, and they kept partying, McDonald said.

McDonald, the former associate of Death Row Records executive Suge Knight, asked “Are you serious? Don’t ask me that right here,” laughing, when a prosecutor asked him if the disputes he described ever led to violence. There was laughter in the courtroom.

On the night of 7 September 1996, Suge Knight and his entourage were in Las Vegas for a high-profile Mike Tyson boxing match, which McDonald referred to as “the fight.” McDonald’s job was “to make sure that nothing funny happened at [club] 662. We were the fall guys, if something happened, we was the ones who were going to go to jail for it, prepared to do it, so nobody else was going to come up there and disrupt it.”

“Neither side could have done anything” that night, McDonald recalled. “There was police all over the place” at Club 662 that night.

McDonald, an elderly man wearing glasses and a plaid flannel shirt, is describing gang life and gang disputes in the 1990s.

McDonald described Tupac Shakur as someone he knew because he was signed to Knight’s Death Row Records.

He said he thought Tupac “inherited the beef” between Suge Knight and others.

“Some of us fell victim to it. We allowed ourselves to become part of the BS, should I said. That was a situation between record companies, not gangs, technically it wasn’t our business. When you had 20 men just fresh out of prison, and didn’t have a way of getting things we wanted, getting a paybcheck from Suge, we did almost anything and everything to get that paycheck.”

McDonald also described the South Side Compton Crips as a rivals, and said “anytime you’re dealing with gang life, it’s going to be violent.”

The next witness is James McDonald, who was asked to confirm that he had been called to testify because of a court order and that he had not volunteered to testify.

On September 7, 1996, he said he was head of security at Club 662 in Las Vegas. He said he knew Suge Knight, the former Death Row Records music executive, from living in the same neighborhood in Compton.

Knight, who is currently incarcerated and has said in a recent media interview that he does not want to testify, was driving in the same car as Tupac Shakur when he was shot in Las Vegas. McDonald described his relationship with Knight as he himself “was the guy that, if something happened, Suge would have you take care of that.”

The jury has returned to the courtroom after a recess for lunch, and testimony is about to resume.

Following O’Kelley’s testimony, the court is now on lunch break, and will resume at 1:45pm Las Vegas time, judge Carli Kierney said.

Under cross-examination from Duane Davis’ defense attorney Michael Sanft, former Las Vegas police detective Dean O’Kelley’s has pivoted from discussing his experience of responding to the scene of the 1996 shooting to talking more broadly about his later work on cold case homicides.

Sanft appears to be trying to use O’Kelley’s testimony to raise questions among jury members about the challenges of solving cold case homicides, and about what kind of new evidence prosecutors ought to have in order to revisit a case like Shakur’s, which went unsolved for nearly three decades.

“A cold case is officially cold when the detectives who are originally assigned to it are no longer there, whether they transferred out of they retired,” O’Kelley testified. “If there’s not an original detective assigned to the case, it’s considered cold.”

A little past 11:30 pm, not quite 15 minutes after the shooting was reported, police got a initial update that they were looking for a light-color, possibly white, Cadillac with two Black male occupants related to the shooting, former police detective Dean O’Kelley testified.

Later, they were told that the Cadillac had four Black male occupants, O’Kelley said. About an hour after the shooting, no longer responsible for securing the crime scene, he and others went looking for the light-colored Cadillac.

Former police detective Dean O’Kelley testifies that the ammunition cartridges found at the scene of the shooting suggests that the weapon used was a Glock.

Former Las Vegas police detective Dean O’Kelley, who responded to the scene of the shooting, described crime scene analyst Dan Ford, who also responded to the scene, as investigator who had responded to “countless” homicides during their overlapping Las Vegas careers.

“Dan had indicated that these [ammunition] cartridge cases were checked for fingerprints at the time, with negative results,” O’Kelley testified.

On the night of 7 September 1996, around 11:17 pm, former Las Vegas police detective Dean O’Kelley testified, he was conducting enforcement activity with gang members near the shooting and heard over the radio a police officer reporting shots being fired and requesting a “code red,” requesting radio traffic to be kept for a minimum. “It’s a sacred things, and you don’t break the code red.”

He responded to the intersection of Koval and Flamingo, at what was then called the Maxim hotel, now the Westin. When he arrived, normal traffic had resumed and people were “still just driving by” on the road, since “whatever had happened was several minutes before.”

A supervisor wanted to know where the shooting had taken place.

“We were able to look out on the street there on Flamingo, just west of Koval. I saw in the headlights just little glints of light,” he said. He recognized the glints of brass from his time at the firing range, O’Kelley said. “We were able to determine where several cartridge cases were located on the street.”

As they located the cartridge cases in the roadway, they placed traffic cones they were carrying on top of or over the cartridge cases, to protect the crime scene from the traffic. By the time he got there, some of the cartridge cases had already been run over by cars, he testified.

They also found one bullet fragment, he said.

With no further questions from either defense or prosecution for the former security guard, the next witness is Dean O’Kelley, a former Las Vegas Metropolitan police officer who worked as a cold case homicide investigator.

On 7 September 1996, the day Tupac Shakur was shot, O’Kelley was a “detective in the gang unit on one of the enforcement teams,” responsible for patrolling known gang areas.

O’Kelley is being asked about the changes about report-taking in the police department over time, and describing 1996 as a pre-digital era in the police department.

Defense attorney Michael Sanft is now questioning William Heidmeyer, a former security officer, about his exact location on the night of the shooting, and his precise vantage point on the aftermath of the shooting.

Sanft emphasizes what the security guard already testified: that he heard gunfire and then saw a young man standing in the street with a gun, but did not actually see that young man shoot his weapon.

Under cross-examination from defense attorney Michael Sanft, former Las Vegas police officer Kenneth Rios says that he does not recall where he wrote up the report about his interaction with Orlando Anderson, or the exact circumstances of why he wrote up the report.

Through the judge, a member of the jury asks retired officer Rios about why he stayed with the apparent victim of the fight in the MGM Grand rather than following those who had done the assault. Rios said that his role was to check if the victim needed medical assistance or two file ar report. “We had already radioed to other officers who were on scene and the MGM Security had radioed to officers up front….It was my responsibility to stay with the victim.”

Kenneth Rios, former Las Vegas police sergeant, identifies himself as one of the police officers in the surveillance footage from the MGM Grand.

The footage shows Rios interacting with a man in a Dan Marino jersey football jersey, who was described as the victim in a fight in the hotel that night. Rios said the man was identified using a California driver’s license.

“I asked him if he needed medical assistance and he refused, he was fine…He told me basically that a couple of guys that he didn’t know jumped him…I asked him if he wanted to file a report, he said no,” Rios testified.

At that point he was released and allowed to go on his way, Rios said.

Later that night, after Rios learned about the shooting of Tupac Shakur, Rios was asked to write a report about his interaction with Orlando Anderson, prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo, said. He remembered the man’s first name as Orlando, Rios confirmed.

The court took a brief ten-minute morning recess, and has now returned.

The next witness to testify is Kenneth Rios, a retired Las Vegas police sergeant, who served in the department for 28 years, and was working patrol at the MGM hotel on the night of Shakur’s killing.

The evidence heard earlier this morning, including graphic images of Tupac Shakur’s body, has been difficult for members of Shakur’s family who are present in the courtroom, according to reporters on the scene. From the Associated Press:

Some members of Tupac Shakur’s family stepped out of the courtroom Tuesday before prosecutors showed photos from his 1996 autopsy…

Jurors were shown a photo of a green body bag at the beginning of her questioning, followed by a grisly photo of his body. His relatives who remained in the courtroom looked away. One woman got up to leave once the photos were shown.

As Gavin explained the autopsy photos, Duane Davis [who is charged in Shakur’s killing] sat still, looking at the screen in front of him. He occasionally whispered in his attorney’s ear.

A map of the MGM Grand was examined during the second day of the Tupac Shakur murder trial in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Michael Ingram, an investigator for MGM resorts in Las Vegas, is now testifying to authenticate the surveillance video from MGM resorts that is being used as evidence in the trial.

As the Associated Press noted, during the trial’s first day, “Jurors were shown video of Shakur’s entourage attacking Davis’ nephew Orlando ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson outside the boxing match at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas hours before the shooting on Sept. 7, 1996.”

Here’s the key video evidence from Monday:

District Court Judge Carli Kierney relayed a few questions directly from the jury to medical examiner Dr. Lisa Gavin.

“Where there any wounds to the head that you or Dr. Jordan observed or noted?”

“No, there were not,” Gavin said.

“Were all the bullets found of the same caliber?”

Gavin said she did not know.

Michael Sanft, the defense attorney for Duane Davis, asked expert witness Dr. Lisa Gavin, a medical examiner, if there were any records missing from the autopsy report done by the late Dr. Jordan.

Gavin said there were not anything missing, but noted that there were relatively few photos were taken during the autopsy, “and so we had few photos of the body itself, so consequently the crime scene analyst photos were helpful in order to come to a determination, in addition to the reports.”

Dr Lisa Gavin testified that the Nevada coroner’s office records identifying Tupac Shakur’s body include “medical records, some photographs, the autopsy report, the investigation report and the toxicology report”.

She also confirmed that the office had an affidavit from Shakur’s mother confirming that the body was that of her son and that he was dead.

“He died of gunshot wounds of chest and abdomen,” Dr. Lisa Gavin said. She confirmed the manner of death was “homicide … death at the hands of another.”

Vanessa Murphy, an investigative reporter for 8News Now in Las Vegas, is reporting live from the Nevada courtroom. She noted that “during this portion where pics of the body of Tupac Shakur were shown, most family members of Tupac Shakur left the courtroom.”

The photographs of Shakur’s body, which are being described in court but not shown on the trial live stream, showed evidence of the medical attempts to save his life after he was shot, Dr. Lisa Gavin confirmed.

Shakur was shot on 7 September 1996, and died in a Las Vegas hospital on 13 Sept, 1996.

If you’re catching up now on what’s happened so far in th Tupac Shakur murder trial in Las Vegas, here is video of key evidence presented to the Las Vegas jury yesterday:

The court heard brief testimony from Thomas Kern, who was a crime scene analyst for the Las Vegas police department in 1996, who was present at the autopsy of Tupac Shakur, and is authenticating evidence from the autopsy. Kern did not face any cross-examination.