The two men who were arrested Monday on suspicion of involvement in the 2002 murder of Run-DMC-DJ Jam Master Jay say they had nothing to do with his death.
56-year-old Ronald Washington and Karl Jordan Jr were both charged. Both said on Monday that they were innocent. Washington has been in prison for 17 years for multiple crimes and will be released in 2022. He has been on the screen as a suspect in Jam Master Jay’s death since 2007.
Jam Master Jay, the stage name of Jason Mizell, was shot in his New York recording studio. Washington is held by prosecutors partly responsible for Mizell’s death because he allegedly tried to intimidate witnesses. He wouldn’t have been the one to pull the trigger.
“Planning and executing the murder of a music icon, in his own studio and in his own neighborhood, is so brutal and shows no respect for the rules of the law,” the prosecution said during the arraignment of the suspects.
Jam Master Jay was a member of the hip-hop group Run-DMC, which scored hits in the eighties and nineties with songs like Walk This Way in It’s Like That. It never became clear why Jam Master Jay was murdered. Researchers suspect that a dispute over cocaine distribution was at the root of this.
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