Jam Master Jay’s best friend told a Brooklyn jury he grabbed the Run-DMC star’s gun moments after his killing, then ran outside in a desperate, failed attempt to chase his killers.
Randy Allen, who knew the hip-hop icon since middle school, testified Tuesday he was sitting in the control room of the DJ’s Queens music studio on Oct. 30, 2002, when a pair of shots rang out.
He didn’t see the shooters, but he ran out when he heard the noise and saw the bloody aftermath, he said.
“I look down, and Jay is laying there, shot. He’s got blood coming from his head. … I grabbed the gun that was on the floor and I ran outside,” Allen said. “I ran outside. I ran to the left, to the right, to the alley, and I didn’t see nobody running.”
Allen was the last of five witnesses in the studio the night of Oct. 30, 2002, to take the stand at the Brooklyn Federal Court trial of Karl Jordan and Ronald “Tinard” Washington.
The duo are accused of killing Jay, born Jason Mizell, over a drug deal. A third suspect, Jay Bryant, is slated to have a separate trial in 2026.
Over the past week and a half, the jury heard from Allen’s sister Lydia High and Mizell’s friend Uriel “Tony” Rincon, who were sitting inches away from Mizell when he was killed, as well as singer Yarrah Concepcion and rapper Michael “Mike B” Rapley, who were in the control room with Allen.
Allen described how Mizell stuck by him after he was jailed for drug dealing in the late 1980s, and taught him the music production ropes when he got out. Allen would eventually become vice president of Mizell’s music label, JMJ Records, and worked with him to promote Rusty Waters, a rap group featuring Allen and Mizell’s nephew.
After he couldn’t find the shooters, Allen cut through a parking lot in front of the studio to run into the NYPD’s 103rd Precinct stationhouse, but not before stashing Mizell’s gun on a tire in the lot.
He didn’t call 911, he said, “because the precinct was closer, and 911, there was a dispatcher involved. … I didn’t want to waste time.”
The police wouldn’t let him back into the crime scene, he said, but he refused to leave. “I went to the bathroom, sat on the floor and stayed there until they took his body out,” Allen said.
In the days after the killing, Rincon told Allen that Jordan, or “Little D,” was the shooter, and Washington was also present, Allen said. High told him that Washington “put a gun to her and held her on the ground.”
Even so, he stayed quiet about their statements when police asked him what he knew.
“I couldn’t do that to my sister. That was her story to tell,” he said. “That was her life. It was up to her to do that. I couldn’t do it.”
When he tried to press High for more details, she cut him off and didn’t speak to him for two years, he said.
Washington’s lawyer Susan Kellman quizzed Allen about his initial statement to police, pointing out that back then he said he heard three to six gunshots from what sounded like two different guns — not two gunshots, like he testified Tuesday.
He also told police that he looked at the security monitor after the shooting and saw a heavyset Black man with short hair, who seemed to be tall, running down the stairs, Kellman said.
“No, I don’t remember saying that,” Allen responded.
Allen said he didn’t buzz anyone into the locked studio in the moments before the shooting. Prosecutors have said that Bryant got buzzed in, and he let Jordan and Washington in through a back fire escape door.
It’s still not clear from the trial testimony who, if anyone, actually buzzed the killers in, or if they slipped in behind someone.
None of the witnesses in the studio offered testimony saying they buzzed the assassins in or knew who did. An employee at an insurance company in the building testified last week that several people were coming into the building for a training meeting shortly before the shooting.
