The murder Jay-Z witnessed aged nine: “On the floor, dead”
Jay-Z’s upbringing in New York could be tough. He grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn, where he was exposed to drug use and violence all around him. It was so bad that, while he was still only a young child, he literally saw someone get murdered before his eyes.
The murder, a horrendous thing to witness, occurred off the back of some regular childhood play. “When I was about nine,” Hov recalled to Rolling Stone in 2007, “we were being mischievous.”
Jay and whoever he was with were messing around in their apartment building, when they saw a man chasing someone else. Naturally, their interest was piqued. “There were two guys running up the stairs in our building,” he explained, “one was chasing the other, and we followed them up.”
The kids were clearly just curious about what was going on, but things quickly escalated for the worst. “We heard this sound—bang!” Jay remembered.
One of the men had been shot, and a young Jay-Z and his friend found the body. “We ran around,” he said, “and the guy was on the floor, dead.”
That is a terrifying, traumatic thing for a child to witness, but, according to Jay himself, he was barely affected by it. He had, after all, been surrounded by violence his entire life. This was just more of the same.
“Sadly, it didn’t do anything to me,” he admitted. “I’d heard shootings before.”
Jay went on to describe the dangerous environment in which he’d grown up. “When I was growing up in the ’80s,” he said, “crack was everywhere—there were Uzis in the projects. I heard shootings my whole life. It was not a big deal.”
Shootings were par for the course in the projects where Jay was raised, so actually witnessing a murder as a child barely seemed to register with him. He later became more directly involved in that world himself, selling crack by the age of 13 and getting shot at a number of times himself. His music career is ultimately what helped him to escape that life.