NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly a quarter-century after rap star Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC was shot to death, a man admitted in court Monday to a role in a killing that stymied investigators for decades.
Jay Bryant pleaded guilty to a federal murder charge, telling a judge that he helped other people get into a recording studio to ambush the DJ, born Jason Mizell.
“I knew a gun was going to be used to shoot Jason Mizell,” Bryant told a federal magistrate. “I knew that what I was doing was wrong and a crime.”
Bryant’s admission brings some closure — but also adds complexity — to a knotty case.
Bryant didn’t name the other people with whom he acted. But a jury in 2024 convicted two other men, Karl Jordan Jr. and Ronald Washington, yet a judge subsequently cleared Jordan.
Washington has also challenged his conviction. His lawyer, Susan Kellman, noted Monday that evidence against Bryant included his DNA on a hat at the crime scene and witness testimony that Bryant once claimed he fired the gun himself. Jordan's lawyers declined to comment.
Bryant, 52, is expected to face a sentence somewhere between 15 and 20 years in prison for killing plus unrelated drug and gun charges to which he pleaded guilty earlier. No sentencing date has been set.
He gave a thumbs-up to someone in the audience before leaving court. The person declined to comment afterward, as did Bryant's attorneys.
Prosecutors had no immediate comment.
Mizell handled the turntables in Run-DMC, a pathbreaking trio he formed with friends Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and Joseph Simmons, known as DJ Run and Rev. Run.
With such 1980s hits as “It’s Tricky,” “My Adidas,” and a version of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” they helped rap climb the ladder from an urban genre into mainstream popularity. Run-DMC was the first rap group with gold- and platinum-selling albums, a Rolling Stone cover, and a video on MTV. The trio was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2009. Mizell also mentored other hip-hop artists, including a young 50 Cent.
At 37, Mizell was gunned down in his studio in the Queens neighborhood where he’d grown up. His October 2002 death followed the late 1990s killings of two other hip-hop greats, Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. Authorities struggled with all three cases for years.
Jordan and Washington — Mizell’s godson and old friend, respectively — were arrested in 2020. Prosecutors said the men were bitter about losing out on a piece of a failed cocaine deal that Mizell had tried to line up. Though Run-DMC was known for its anti-drug message, prosecutors and a trial witness said the DJ moonlighted in the cocaine trade in his later years to cover his bills and keep being generous to friends after music money dried up somewhat.
According to prosecutors and trial witnesses, Jordan shot Mizell while Washington blocked the door during the shooting and ordered one of Mizell’s aides to get on the ground. Both men denied the allegations. Jordan’s attorneys said he was at his girlfriend’s home when the DJ was shot, and Washington’s lawyers said he had no incentive to kill the famous friend who helped him financially.
Nearly three years after their arrests, prosecutors abruptly brought Bryant into their picture of the killing.
Saying that Bryant’s DNA had been found on a hat in the studio and that he’d been seen entering the building, prosecutors added him to the murder indictment. He was already jailed on the drug and gun case.
Bryant knew someone in common with Jordan and Washington, according to testimony at their trial. But unlike them, Bryant had little, if any, connection to Mizell.
Bryant said in court Monday that he was connected with people who were involved in a cocaine deal with the DJ and that he "helped them kill Jason Mizell by helping them gain entry to the recording studio.”
Bryant’s uncle has said his nephew told him he shot Mizell after the artist reached for a gun. But no one else testified that Bryant even entered the studio.
Instead, prosecutors contended that Bryant was enlisted to make his way into the studio building and open a back fire door, allowing Washington and Jordan to walk in without buzzing up and alerting Mizell they were coming.
While neither Jordan’s nor Washington’s DNA was on the cap, then-prosecutor Artie McConnell suggested one of them had accidentally left it behind, and that Bryant had simply touched it at some point beforehand.
FILE - Run-D.M.C.'s Jason Mizell, Jam-Master Jay, poses with teenagers gathered at New York's Madison Square Garden, Oct. 7, 1986, in New York City. (AP Photo/G. Paul Burnett, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal law enforcement officials are evaluating how to proceed with some high-profile public events featuring President Donald Trump after the attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
It’s the third time in less than two years that a gunman has come uncomfortably close to Trump, renewing the central tension over how to accommodate the public-facing demands of the president's office while minimizing the risk of an attack.
Saturday’s episode, in which a man armed with guns and knives tried to storm the Washington hotel ballroom where the president was set to address the White House Correspondents’ Association, comes ahead of Trump’s expected participation in a stretch of large, high-profile events indoors and outdoors in the months ahead. Among them, he’s set to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary, oversee the U.S. co-hosting the World Cup and lead rallies meant to galvanize support for Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles will hold a meeting this week with officials from the White House operations team, the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security to discuss security protocol at events with the president, according to a senior White House official. The meeting will examine security steps that were successful on Saturday while “exploring additional options” for future events, said the official, who insisted on anonymity to confirm private discussions.
Separately, a person familiar with the matter said the U.S. Secret Service was already reevaluating its security footing for the upcoming events. The agency’s posture was already elevated due to the extraordinary number of threats facing Trump — including two back-to-back assassination attempts in 2024 — and the realities of recent events such as the U.S.-Iran war.
“I can’t imagine that there’s any profession that is more dangerous,” Trump said of the presidency Saturday night from the White House.
Inside the Secret Service, agents on protective intelligence and threat assessment teams are also reexamining threats made against Trump in recent months. Copycat violence can follow high-profile attacks, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security planning.
The White House and Buckingham Palace said King Charles and Queen Camilla’s state visit Monday is going ahead as planned. Still, organizing around large-scale events deeper in the future — including the UFC bout on the White House lawn marking Trump’s 80th birthday in June, World Cup matches and the IndyCar race past the White House — could get more complicated.
Lawmakers, event attendees and some allies of the president saw fault in the correspondents’ dinner security planning, questioning why someone like the shooter could reserve a room at the hotel to sneak in weapons around the outermost layer of security.
Republican Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman emeritus of the House Homeland Security Committee, said security protocols for Trump and Vice President JD Vance may need altering.
“I think the Secret Service needs to reconsider having both the president and vice president together at something like that,” McCaul told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Kari Lake, a former unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial candidate in Arizona and Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, complained about not having to show a photo ID to match her ticket to the event when entering the hotel for the correspondents’ dinner. “I can’t believe how lax the security was,” Lake wrote on X.
The Secret Service is charged only with the safety of its protectees, not of the event itself, and the agency immediately celebrated its response, drawing a high-profile endorsement from Trump himself.
“Our multilayered protection works,” director Sean Curran said Saturday.
“Those guys did a good job last night. They did a really good job,” echoed Trump on Sunday in an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes.”
Garrett Graff, author of “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die,” wrote in an analysis of the multiple layers of security around Trump during the dinner, “Seems like the system basically working as designed, amid the always necessary trade-offs of security in a free society.”
Retired Secret Service Agent Thomas D. Quinn, who helped pioneer Secret Service counterassault teams, posted on X that “the Secret Service security plan for the WHCD worked and the assailant was stopped.” He continued, “As long as we are a free people in a freedom loving Nation, the Secret Service responsibilities will continue to be immense.”
Ronald Kessler, author of “In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect,” said authorities are likely to consider placing bulletproof glass around where Trump speaks outside and inside — not unlike after the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt during the heat of the 2024 presidential campaign.
Attendees, Kessler said, will likely be more thoroughly screened going forward — exacerbating lines at entrances that can already take hours to clear. An example of what might happen came last fall, when Trump attended the men’s final of the U.S. Open tennis tournament and triggered massive security lines.
Such events underscore the complicated security questions surrounding presidential protection in a country where citizens expect their leaders to move through public spaces, hold rallies, attend events and appear before crowds.
“Presidents don’t like to have too much protection,” Kessler said. “I think, by their nature, they’re very outgoing. They want to meet people. They don’t want to be accused of being prisoners of the White House. And so, they’ll try to get around some of these improvements.”
The Secret Service took over full-time responsibility for protecting the president during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, who came to office after an assassin killed William McKinley in 1901. Roosevelt found the constant security presence tiresome, however, and would sometimes slip away for unprotected hikes or horseback rides in Washington’s Rock Creek Park, according to the White House Historical Association.
Security personnel wanted President Ronald Reagan to exit the building where Saturday night’s shooting occurred, the Washington Hilton, through a covered garage in 1981, Kessler said. Reagan’s staff worried the optics would be bad, however, and the president was shot as he left an open-air exit, ultimately surviving.
After shots were fired Saturday, Secret Service agents surrounded Trump, who appeared to slip slightly as he was whisked away. Another team moved Vance so quickly it seemed as if it might haul him out while still seated in a banquet chair.
Trump told “60 Minutes” on Sunday that he “wasn’t making it easy” for the Secret Service by being “a little bit me.”
“I wanted to see what was happening,” the president said Sunday. “And by that time we started to realize maybe it was a bad problem — different kind of a problem — bad one.”
“I probably made them act a little bit more slowly. I said: ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. Lemme see. Wait a minute,’” Trump said. He said he started walking out but: “They said, 'Please go down. Please go down on the floor.′ So I went down, and the first lady went down also.”
Trump repeatedly praised the Secret Service and his detail, and he has pushed the correspondents’ association to reschedule the dinner. He said it would have “even more security.”
“And they’ll have bigger perimeter security,” he said. "It’ll be fine.”
Associated Press writers Seung Min Kim in Washington and Mike Balsamo in New York contributed.
U.S. Secret Service agents surround President Donald Trump as he is taken from the stage after a shooting incident outside the ballroom during the White House Correspondents Dinner, Saturday, April 25, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Members of law enforcement respond during the White House Correspondents Dinner, Saturday, April 25, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
U.S. Secret Service agents surround President Donald Trump, third from left, as he is taken from the stage after a shooting incident outside the ballroom during the White House Correspondents Dinner, Saturday, April 25, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
