She hoped to sing for a rap icon. Instead, she was there the night Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay died

NEW YORK >> She was a teenaged aspiring R&B singer and rapper who had gotten an appointment at Jam Master Jay’s recording studio.

But just minutes after Yarrah Concepcion met the Run-DMC star, he was shot dead.

Concepcion was brought to tears as she testified Thursday in the trial of two men charged in the 2002 killing. One of several people in various parts of the studio on the night of one of the hip hop world’s most infamous slayings, she recalled seeing the slain DJ on the studio floor.

“I knew he was gone,” she said. “But I just had to try to see if he was alive.”

Jam Master Jay, born Jason Mizell, was one in a series of high-profile hip hop figures whose killings in the late 1990s and early 2000s stymied investigators for years. Karl Jordan Jr. and Ronald Washington were charged only in 2020 with killing Mizell.

The two have pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors say Washington brandished a gun, Jordan fired on Mizell, and the attack was spurred by a drug-dealing beef. There has been no testimony in the trial’s first week about any drug transactions, but there are weeks more to come.

A cousin and aide of Mizell’s testified Thursday that Washington asked for bullets days before the shooting and warned that “something bad is gonna happen” at the studio. Mizell himself “was nervous about something” and started carrying a gun shortly before he was killed, said the cousin, Stephon Watford.

In the hours after the slaying, Washington — an old friend of Mizell’s who was living on the sofa at the DJ’s childhood home — returned to the house with a bottle of Hennessy Cognac and said, “Don’t throw away this bottle, because this is the last bottle that Jay drank out of,” according to Watford. He called the remark callous.

One of Washington’s lawyers, Susan Kellman, suggested that the comment “was his way of showing or communicating a connection to Jay.” She queried how Watford could recall the night of the 2002 shooting in detail while saying that he didn’t recall some inconsistent things that investigators’ notes have him saying in and after 2018.

Watford replied that “2002 was a tragedy in my life” that he would never forget.

Concepcion, like Watford, did not see the shooting itself. She with shaking hands. Mizell was didn’t implicate Jordan, Washington slumped on the floor, with his arm or anyone else but described over his head, she testified. the shock of gunfire that seemed “Where did Jay get shot?” she to come out of the blue. recalled asking one of the DJ’s

She told jurors that she got an aides, Uriel Rincon, who himself appointment through people in had been shot in the leg.

Mizell’s circle, but the famous DJ Concepcion said she asked him told her he didn’t have time for her to help her check Mizell’s pulse, so that evening. Ultimately, she was the two moved the 37-year-old rap escorted from the studio’s lounge star’s arm. He had been shot in the area into the adjoining control head. room to play her demo tape for “I’m sorry — I can’t talk about Mizell’s business partner, Randy stuff like this,” Concepcion told Allen, and performer Michael Rapley, jurors, fanning herself and tearing or Mike B. Mizell was his producer. up, then briefly describing the graphic particulars of what she

Concepcion was singing along saw. to her second song, she testified, Rapley, too, told jurors Thursday when she heard the door close, the that he heard the shots and sound of tussling in the lounge, feared everyone in the control “and then two gunshots went off — room would be attacked next. ‘paw! paw!,’” she told a jury Thursday. On venturing out into the lounge, “I saw Jay, and everything

“That’s when I started getting else was a blur,” Rapley testified. frantic,” Concepcion said. He acknowledged he didn’t see

Thinking of her toddler son and Mizell’s killer, choking up as he afraid there would be gunfire in recalled the hip hop star who lent the control room next, she tried in him money for his mother’s funeral. vain to kick out an air conditioner and escape through the window, While cross-examining Rapley, she told jurors. Then she hid behind Kellman said he had told police he a couch until she heard people peeked out of the control room and in the lounge talking about calling saw a man in a black stocking cap. the police. Rapley testified Thursday that he

She emerged, holding her heart *didn’t recall seeing or saying that.