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Artist News Legal
Two men charged for murdering Jam Master May
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 18 August 2020
Two men have been charged with the murder of Jam Master Jay nearly eighteen years after the Run DMC DJ was shot dead at his New York recording studio.
Prosecutors say that the musician, real name Jason Mizell, was killed in a “drug related homicide”. The two men being charged with his murder are Ronald Washington and Karl Jordan who, it’s claimed, were both involved in a dispute with Mizell over the profits generated by a drugs deal.
At a press conference yesterday, officials said that that drugs deal involved 10kg of cocaine, and that Mizell had threatened to cut Washington and Jordan out of the profits from the transaction. As a result, prosecutor Seth DuCharme alleged, the two men walked into Mizell’s studio “and murdered him in cold blood”.
According to the New York Times, both men had long been linked to the crime, with specific albeit informal allegations regarding Washington’s involvement in the shooting being made when he was being prosecuted over a robbery in 2007.
At the time Washington denied the allegations, insisting that Mizell was a “childhood friend”. As for this week’s formal charges, Jordan has already pleaded not guilty. Washington, who is currently in jail, should enter his plea when he is arraigned later this week.
In his statement, prosecutor DuCharme also acknowledged the fact that nearly two decades have now passed since Mizell’s murder, explaining: “We started investigating that case a very long time ago, in the early 2000s, but there were a lot of challenges in bringing that case”.
He then added “for the crime of murder, the passage of time offers you no escape”, a sentiment also expressed by New York Police Department Commissioner Dermot Shea in his response to the charges.
“The gunshots that rang out in a recording studio in Queens nearly eighteen years ago, taking this pioneering rap artist’s life, have been answered”, Shea said in a statement.
“Today’s indictment”, he went on, “shows that no amount of time passed can erase the commitment of our NYPD detectives, federal law enforcement partners, and prosecutors in the US Attorney’s Office For The Eastern District, to the pursuit of justice”.
