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- Trial for 2002 murder of Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay continues in Brooklyn federal court
- The police officer who first arrived at the scene testified about what he found and found the rap legend dead.
- A judge denied a prosecutor’s attempt to use a suspect’s rap lyrics during the trial.
The police officer who was first on the scene of the 2002 murder of Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay admitted he lost his notes from the murder of a rap superstar that later became an infamous cold case.
William Eagan, who worked for the New York City Police Department’s Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit, testified Tuesday about being the first to arrive at the Queen’s studio where Jay, born Jason Mizell, was found dead.
He described how witnesses were hysterical and provided little information about the killers.
During cross-examination, Eagan claimed that he never made a report and only took notes in a notebook, which he later lost.
—So everything you mentioned about the murder of a famous rapper has been lost? defense attorney Jacqueline Cistaro asked sarcastically.
Eagan took the stand on the second day of the trial. in Brooklyn federal court for Karl Jordan Jr., 40, and Ronald Washington, 59. The two, along with a third man facing a separate trial, were accused of killing the rap legend in 2002 during a cocaine deal gone bad.
Jordan and Washington sat next to their attorneys as law enforcement officials testified. Jordan wore a navy blue plaid suit, white shirt and yellow patterned tie, while Washington wore a gray suit, blue shirt and pink tie.
Prosecutors say the men walked into a Queens recording studio, angry at being excluded from the drug deal, and Jordan shot Mizell at point-blank range.
The men fled the scene and avoided arrest for years. The murder became an infamous cold case until prosecutors announced the arrests of Jordan and Washington in 2020.
The suspects face a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum of at least 20 years in prison if convicted. The government has said it will not seek the death penalty.
Mizell worked on the turntables alongside rappers Joe ‘Run’ Simmons and Darryl ‘DMC’ McDaniels as the group helped bring hip-hop to the mainstream in the 1980s with hits like ‘It’s Tricky’ and a new version of ‘Walk This’ by Aerosmith. A far cry from the best-selling album of 1986, Raising Hell.
Some of their songs advocate against illegal narcotics, and the group even recorded ‘Just Say No!’ Anti-drug public service announcement in the late 1980s for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Miranda Gonzalez said that as the attention faded, Mizell turned to drug trafficking, serving as a middleman with sellers and buyers across the country.
A few simple calls, he said, could earn him “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.
In the late ’90s and early ’00s, Run-DMC had made very few recordings together. Neither Simmons nor McDaniels were present during the first day of the trial.
Mizell was 37 years old and a father of three when he was shot to death after allegedly acquiring 10 kilograms of cocaine from a Midwest distributor, which Washington, Jordan and others planned to distribute in the Baltimore area.
But the dealer involved in the sale refused to work with Washington, cutting both defendants out of a potential $200,000 payday, he alleged.
Jordan, who was 18 at the time, and Washington, then 38, thought they would be part of the lucrative deal with Baltimore and were enraged when Mizell told them they were excluded, leaving them with nothing.
Gonzalez said that in the days before his death, Mizell acted worried and was carrying a gun.
On the night of October 30, 2002, however, he barely had time to react when the two men and an accomplice, Jay Bryant, showed up at his studio in Jamaica, Queens.
Bryant was charged last year after he was seen entering the building the night of the murder and his DNA was recovered at the scene. He will be tried separately in 2026.
In prosecutors’ account of the murder, Mizell was at his recording studio in Hollis, the Queens neighborhood on the east side of New York City where he and the two defendants grew up.
The studio was a neighborhood hangout, prosecutors said. Mizell’s manager, Lydia High, was there, along with Mizell’s friend, Tony Rincón, while three other people worked on the music in the closed recording room.
Byrant, a friend of Jordan’s whom Mizell did not know, entered through the front door and let Washington and Jordan in through a locked rear fire escape, both armed with handguns, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors say Washington waved a gun and ordered a person to lie on the ground just as Mizell stood up from a couch to greet his godson.
Another shot hit and wounded another man who was in the studio at the time, Mizell’s friend Uriel ‘Tony’ Rincón, before the killers fled, Gonzalez said Monday during opening statements.
Jordan shot him in the head with a .40-caliber bullet from inches away, “killing him instantly” in a “brazen murder,” Gonzalez told the jury. The three defendants fled moments later.
“It was an ambush, an execution,” he said. And you will learn that he was motivated by greed and revenge. He was murdered in his own studio by people he knew.
Eagan recalled how Randy Allen came to the 103rd Precinct where he worked to make a statement about the murder. He told officers it happened in the studio, but offered few more details.
Immediately afterwards, the agent and his partner went to the scene.
‘I heard commotion coming from that area. “I saw a body lying on the ground in front of me,” Eagan testified.
‘I checked the body. He didn’t (he seemed to be alive). The deceased was Jason Mizell.
‘Another gentleman sat next to him on the sofa and shouted that he had been shot. His last name was Rincón.
‘When I walked through the door, I observed a woman lying on the floor upset, screaming and crying. She was unintelligible. I don’t know what she was saying.
Eagan said he ruled out anyone as a suspect since they did not appear to be a threat.
Jordan’s defense attorney, Michael Houston, asked Eagan if he questioned Rincón about what happened during cross-examination.
“I asked him who shot him, but he didn’t answer,” the former lieutenant said. “He kept saying that he was shot and to ask for help.”
“Did you ask if they ran away or went somewhere?” Houston asked.
“I went on to secure the other room because I didn’t know if there was another threat,” Eagan said.
Washington’s attorney, Cistaro, asked, “When asked who shot (Mr. Rincón), he responded, ‘I don’t know.'”
“I don’t remember him saying that,” Eagan responded.
Police had difficulty closing the case because witnesses were initially uncommunicative.
People in the room at the time did not identify the killers until months and even years later, Gonzalez said. Both Rincón and High are expected to testify, González said, and explain why it took them so long to reveal the killers’ identities to investigators.
Attorneys defending Washington and Jordan bluntly told jurors that the defendants did not kill Mizell.
They argued that police haven’t figured it out yet and urged juries to be skeptical of witnesses who cooperate in exchange for leniency in their own legal problems.
Jordan was first named as a possible murder suspect in 2007, while he was on trial for a series of armed robberies, although he maintained he was not involved.
Jordan also faces weapons and cocaine possession charges in the trial in which he pleaded not guilty.
While he has no criminal record as an adult, prosecutors allege he has continued to be involved in narcotics trafficking and say they have footage of him selling cocaine to an undercover agent.
Washington was serving a 17-year federal prison sentence for six separate robberies when he was charged with Mizell’s murder.
The trial for Washington and Jordan will be decided by an anonymous jury in federal court in Brooklyn and will resume Tuesday.
The trial is expected to last four weeks.
Also Tuesday, a judge denied a prosecutor’s request to use Jordan’s rap songs during the trial. The suspect used the pseudonym ‘Yadi’ to compose the songs, including one titled ‘Aim for the Head’.
Some of the songs’ lyrics describe criminal behavior, and in Aim for the Head, Jordan brags about shooting people in the head, according to prosecutors.
But the judge dismissed the motion, writing in a ruling that they did not include specific facts.
‘In the context of rap music, however, the Court must be aware that “hip hop is fundamentally an art form that traffics in hyperbole, parody, kitsch, dramatic license, double meanings, significations and other literary conventions and artistic to achieve it. cross stitch,” the judge wrote.
“Jordan’s lyrics do not mention Mizell, the recording studio where he was murdered, the other shooting victim or any alleged accomplices,” the judge added. “The government also does not claim that Jordan wrote or performed these lyrics around the time of the alleged murder.”