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Last week, two men from Mizell’s old neighborhood were convicted in the slaying after a trial that laid bare the difficult predicament he found himself in prior to the murder.
With Run-DMC’s popularity fading, large paydays became more elusive for Mizell, who was known for showering cash on his family, friends and even acquaintances from his old haunts in Hollis, Queens. So he leveraged his old contacts from the neighborhood to carry out drug deals, according to courtroom testimony, a decision that ultimately led to his killing.
For some of those who had known Mizell the longest, the convictions were bittersweet. In the days since the trial, they have wondered how differently his life could have played out had he managed to leave behind the hustlers and hangers-on from his past.
“That was my cousin’s downfall,” said Ryan “Doc” Thompson, who grew up with Mizell and was among his closest confidants. “It was just too late to wash his hands of these people.”
Wendell Fite, a childhood friend of Mizell’s better known by his stage name DJ Hurricane, offered a similar take.
“Jay was the kind of person who thought he could help anybody no matter who that person was,” he said. “Jay always had a big heart, which is why he’s not here today, because he surrounded himself with the wrong people.”
Family ties
Mizell grew up on 203rd Street, one of three siblings whose mother was a schoolteacher and father was a social worker. As a kid, Mizell didn’t have to go far to visit one of his closest friends, a boy who came to be known as Darren “Big D” Jordan.
“He lived directly across the street,” Ryan Thompson said.
The two went way back. Their mothers were best friends who had attended the same church in Brooklyn. The Mizells moved to Hollis, a middle-class neighborhood at the time, to provide a better environment for their children.
Mizell fell in with a group of kids who were burglarizing homes and he served time in juvenile detention. When he got out, he focused his attention on his turntables and went on to become a founding member of Run-DMC.
But he remained tight with his old neighborhood pals. So after Jordan’s son, Karl “Little D” Jordan Jr., was born in 1984, it was no surprise that Mizell became like a godfather figure to him.
“That’s how close these two families were growing up,” Ryan Thompson said.
But that was then. In an almost Shakespearean twist, Jordan Jr. was one of the two men convicted in Mizell’s murder.
The then-18-year-old fired a bullet into Mizell’s head from inches away, a witness told the jury, in what prosecutors described as an act of revenge for being cut out of a lucrative cocaine deal.
“It was an ambush, an execution,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Miranda Gonzalez told the jury in her opening remarks, “motivated by greed and revenge.”
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