A date has been set for late Run DMC rapper and DJ Jam Master Jay’s (real name Jason Mizell) murder trial, 20 years after the tragic shooting inside his Jamaica, Queens studio that took his life at the age of 37 in 2002.
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Jury selection, opening statements, and testimony for the case are currently scheduled to begin in September. The cold case was revived in 2020, when law enforcement indicted two men, Ronald Washington and Karl Jordan Jr., on charges of Jay's murder on October 30, 2002. Washington is currently serving a federal prison sentence for robbery, while Jordan was taken into custody in August 2020.
“They shot him in cold blood,” acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Seth DuCharme said in a press conference at the time. “Our office along with our federal partners and the NYPD started working that case in the early 2000s, very soon after the murder and there were a lot of challenges that we faced right away. In fact, one of the first cases that I worked on when I was here as a prosecutor in 2008 was this very case. These gentlemen and our team were able to accomplish what I was frankly not then able to accomplish. It’s really through their hard work and the work of the Queens cold case detectives squad, the FBI who was with us at the outset and the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] who had joined us along the way, really, really never gave up on this case."
“It was important to us then and it remains extremely important to us now to bring justice to the victim, and his family and his friends -- and the community that cared so much about those events.”
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