One of the two men convicted of murdering rap legend Jam Master Jay was stabbed during a melee at a New York City jail over the weekend, according to two sources familiar with the attack.
The man, Karl "Little D" Jordan, was hospitalized following the brawl Saturday at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.
A spokesman for the federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed that there was a fight at the jail involving "multiple incarcerated individuals" just after 1 p.m. on Saturday. Two people were sent to the hospital, said the spokesman, who did not identify them or say what sparked the brawl.
The federal facility in Brooklyn, which also houses the rap mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, has a reputation for extreme violence. It was the scene of two fatal stabbings in two months last summer. And that April, MS-13 gang members stabbed an inmate 44 times in a shocking attack that was caught on camera.
Jordan has been behind bars there since September 2020 when he was charged in the cold case murder of the pioneering Run-DMC deejay born Jason Mizell who was fatally shot in his Queens recording studio in 2002.
One of Mizell’s cousins told NBC News he was glad that Jordan survived the jailhouse stabbing.
“I think him being killed would be the easy way out,” said the cousin, Carlis Thompson. “I’d rather him just be in jail for the rest of his life.”
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment on the incident, which was first reported by the New York Daily News.
The killing of Mizell rocked the hip-hop world and remained one of New York City's most notorious unsolved murders for decades.
Prosecutors said Mizell was killed in a dispute over a drug deal he was planning. Both Jordan and the second man charged in the killing, Ronald "Tinard" Washington, grew up in the same neighborhood as Mizell and had known him for years. Jordan was Mizell's godson.
By the early 2000s, Run-DMC’s popularity was fading and large paydays became more elusive for Mizell. So he leveraged his old contacts from the neighborhood — people like Jordan and Washington — to carry out drug deals, according to courtroom testimony.
But in August 2002, Mizell cut Jordan and Washington out of a cocaine deal worth almost $200,000, prosecutors said at trial. Two months later, the pair showed up at Mizell's studio and Jordan shot him in the head at close range, prosecutors said.
The two men were found guilty of murder in February 2024 following a four-week trial. But they have yet to be sentenced because the judge must first rule on a motion to toss the verdicts.
A third man indicted in the killing, Jay Bryant, is set to go on trial early next year.
