On a cold, rainy evening just before Halloween in 2002, an assassin’s bullet put an end to what was arguably the most influential hip-hop group of all time: Run-DMC.

At approximately 7:30 p.m. on October 30, Run-DMC’s longtime DJ, Jason Mizell—a.k.a. Jam Master Jay—was shot in the head at point-blank range in his New York City recording studio by an intruder. Jay was seated on a couch in the lounge playing video games when a masked man burst into his Merrick Boulevard studio and opened fire with a .40-caliber pistol.

Thirty-seven-year-old Mizell died instantly, only blocks from where he and his band mates and close friends, rappers Joseph “Run” Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, had grown up in the middle class, mostly African-American suburb of Hollis, Queens. To this day, both the identity and the motive of Mizell’s murderer remain unknown.

When Jam Master Jay died in late 2002, he, Run, and DMC were just a few months away from celebrating their twentieth anniversary as a group. To the dismay of Run-DMC’s many fans in the United States and around the world, within days of Jay’s funeral Simmons announced that the group was officially retired. “I can’t get out on stage with a new deejay,” Run explained to the press. “I don’t know any other way but with the original three members.”

According to some music critics and chroniclers of popular culture, Run-DMC played a greater role in shaping the sound and style of rap than any other hip-hop group before or since. When the trio first appeared on New York City’s emerging hip-hop scene in the early 1980s, their stripped-down musical arrangements, edgy lyrics, and casual, straight-off-the street look immediately captured the imagination of the black community and spawned a host of imitators. By the mid-eighties, Run-DMC’s innovative melding of rap with heavy metal had launched them into the musical mainstream, making them the first hip-hop group to gain widespread popularity among a non–African-American audience.

During the 1980s, Run-DMC attained a number of important “firsts” in addition to being the first rap group with broad crossover appeal, achievements that helped make hiphop one of the most powerful cultural movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in America. With a recording career spanning nearly two decades and more than 25 million albums sold, Run-DMC was the first rap group to have a gold album (the self-named Run-DMC in 1984), a platinum album (King of Rock in 1985), and a multiplatinum album (Raising Hell in 1986). They were also the first rappers to have a music video played on MTV, to be nominated for a Grammy award, and to appear on the cover of America’s premier rock magazine, Rolling Stone. By 1986, with the release of their third album, Raising Hell, and its smash hit single, “Walk This Way,” recorded with rock stars Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Run-DMC was the most famous and successful hip-hop group in the world.

In the years following the phenomenal popularity of Raising Hell, however, the group confronted a series of daunting challenges: fierce competition from the new “gangsta” rappers such as N.W.A., declining record sales and concert bookings, lackluster reviews, drug and alcohol addictions, and a criminal trial. Ironically, in 2002, the year that Jason Mizell died, things were finally beginning to look up for the trio. All three members had gotten their personal lives back on track, and that summer, Run-DMC opened for Aerosmith, their “Walk This Way” collaborators, on a major national tour. Encouraged by the enthusiastic reception they received everywhere they performed on the sellout tour, Run, DMC, and Jay began planning a twentieth-anniversary album. Then, the unimaginable happened: Jam Master Jay was shot and killed.

For nearly three years following the senseless murder of Jam Master Jay, Run and DMC kept out of the public view except to participate in memorials to their slain bandmate. But neither rapper was ready to abandon the music that had been an integral part of their lives since they were thirteen years old. In 2005 and 2006, respectively, Run, or “Rev Run” as he now called himself, and DMC each released a solo rap album. It remains to be seen whether Rev Run and DMC can build successful solo musical careers, but the legacy of the celebrated rap group that the two friends helped found in 1983 still endures.

When Jason Mizell, Joseph Simmons, and Darryl McDaniels released their first hit single, “It’s Like That,” the record’s minimalist arrangement and hard-hitting lyrics not only introduced a whole new element into rap but also helped move hip-hop music and culture out of its New York City birthplace and into the national consciousness. As Jay’s longtime friend from Hollis, rapper and DJ Wendell “Hurricane” Fite, told author Ronin Ro shortly after Jay’s death, Run-DMC “opened the doors for rap music... Without Run-DMC, I really don’t know how far hip-hop would have gone.”