Unfinished Justice: Inside the NYPD Cold Case Squad · Asterlight

The Unsolved Murder of Jam Master Jay of the legendary hip hop group Run DMC

·31 min·2 clips

Jason Mizell was shot in his studio while playing video games, with a gun next to him but no time to reach it.

Derek Parker introduces himself as the hip-hop cop, a detective from Hollis who spent 20 years with the NYPD, including a stint on the Colt K Squad, and often handled rap-related cases. He recalls getting repeated phone calls on October 30, before the news had even broken, telling him Jason had been shot in Queens. He was struck by how recent it all was. Jam Master Jay, also known as Jason Mizell, had parked his black SUV outside his 24-hour music recording studio that evening and walked into the studio before being shot. The investigation quickly ran into scarcity. Witnesses would not cooperate. The security camera footage outside the studio was too unclear to help. Crime scene recovery did not turn up much either. Detectives found shell casings and a couple of firearms, but none of them was the murder weapon. The team hit a dead end. Journalists, though, were able to get people talking. When press reports surfaced about Jay’s cash flow issues, the case opened up in a different way. Derek says the reporting pointed to tax trouble and bills, including more than $400,000 in back taxes. After that, the police began receiving a flood of tips. Those calls named possible suspects one after another. One name that kept coming up was Kenneth McGriff, better known as Supreme, a major drug dealer long known in South Jamaica, Queens. The episode frames the case as one shaped by rumor, reporting, and police memory, but not by a clean resolution. The finale also brings in Vita and retired first grade detective Wendell Stratford to talk about cold cases, how they were cracked, and how the squad has evolved over the years. By the end, the case is still open, but the investigative path is clear enough to see where it stalled and why.

As heard by us

A measured cold-case account that keeps hip-hop history and police work in the same frame.

A retired NYPD detective known as the hip-hop cop guides the story through Jam Master Jay's killing with a plainspoken, procedural eye. It starts with the Halloween-eve calls and a studio video that leads nowhere, then moves into witness hesitation, thin physical evidence, and…

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a Queens cold case that starts outside a 24-hour studio and opens into a larger hip-hop murder investigation.

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