Before he was shot, Jay was getting anonymous phone calls saying “I’m gonna get you,” or “I’m gonna shoot you,” Parker said. “I think he knew who the person was at the other end of that line or who these people were.”
Multiple surveillance cameras around the studio weren’t working when Jay was shot.
“So what the cops told me is somebody took all the cameras and turned them offline, moved them so the monitors wouldn’t show nobody coming up in here,” said Marvin Thompson, Jay’s brother, according to the 2016 Crime Wach Daily interview. Thompson died in 2018.
“This ‘no snitch rule,’ where people in the street say ‘snitches get stitches’ — you can’t talk to the police, you can’t talk to authorities,” said retired NYPD Detective Parker.
In 2009, the corner of 205th Street and Hollis Avenue in Hollis was renamed Run-DMC JMJ Way. A mural in his memory has attracted visitors. Sixteen years after Jay’s murder, the Hollis community unveiled a new Jam Master Jay mural by Eduardo Kobra. To this day people still come by lay hands on it and light candles. Every year on the anniversary of his murder there’s a vigil.
