I hope you are in a better place now Jason Mizell/Jam Master Jay. The world is worse off with you no longer in it.

-s-b-g

Hey, Sad day. Of all the people to get caught in that sh*t. What a shame. It's like Rap has lost their Beatle.

Mark

The McCall family love the Run DMC family. -Charmaine

The Run-DMC brought alot respect to the African American community consoles to RUN DMC, DEF Jam. -Douglas

I am sending my sympathy out to RUN DMC House and Russell Simmons....Love and Peace from The McCalls in The Bronx, New York.

More from AP:

Mizell served as the platinum-selling group's disc jockey, providing background for singers Joseph Simmons, better known as Run, and Darryl McDaniels, better known as DMC.

The group is widely credited with helping bring hip-hop into music's mainstream, including the group's smash collaboration with Aerosmith (news - web sites) on the 1980s standard "Walk This Way" and hits like "My Adidas" and "It's Tricky."

"We always knew rap was for everyone," Mizell said in a 2001 interview with MTV. "Anyone could rap over all kinds of music."

Mizell is the latest in a line of hip-hop artists to fall victim to violence. Rappers Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur were murdered within seven months of each other in 1996 and 1997 - crimes that some believe were the result of an East Coast-West Coast rap war.

But Run DMC and their songs were never about violence. The group promoted education and unity.

In 1986, the trio said they were outraged by the rise of fatal gang violence in the Los Angeles area. They called for a day of peace between warring street gangs.

"This is the first town where you feel the gangs from the minute you step into town to the time you leave," Mizell said at the time.

Mizell's friends and fans gathered near the studio, located above a restaurant and a check-cashing business. The crowd included many people from the Hollis section of Queens, where the members of Run DMC grew up.

"They're the best. They're the pioneers in hip hop," said Arlene Clark, 39, who grew up in the same neighborhood. "They took it to the highest level it could go."

Chuck D, the founder of the hip-hop group Public Enemy, blamed record companies and the advertising for perpetuating "a climate of violence" in the rap industry. "When it comes to us, we're disposable commodities," he said.

Doctor Dre, a New York radio station DJ who had been friends with Mizell since the mid-1980s, said, "This is not a person who went out looking for trouble. ... He's known as a person that builds, that creates and is trying to make the right things happen."

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