The First Hours of the Investigation

The emergency response

At about 1:33 p.m. on January 27, 1998, officers responded to a report of a man shot at 2335 Eighth Avenue, also known as Frederick Douglass Boulevard. They found retired NYPD officer Albert Ward mortally wounded during a robbery inside the illegal gambling joint he operated. A witness immediately described two Black male perpetrators, one in green and one in yellow.

What investigators recovered

The Crime Scene Unit collected spent rounds, shell casings, a live round, Ward’s .38-caliber revolver, duct tape, papers, envelopes, and other items for possible fingerprint testing. The recovered prints did not identify JJ. Palm prints and one fingerprint were attributed to people already known to have been there.

Ward’s revolver had been fired, but investigators did not recover its projectile at the scene. Police therefore canvassed hospitals on the possibility that one of the fleeing robbers had been wounded. The National Registry of Exonerations’ case record reports that the canvass did not produce evidence connecting JJ to the crime.

The first description

The description broadcast that afternoon identified the shooter as a light-complexioned Black man in his early twenties, approximately 5 feet 7 inches to 5 feet 9 inches tall and 150 to 160 pounds, with facial hair and braids, wearing a yellow or orange jacket. A witness-assisted sketch distributed that night repeated the description of a Black man with braided hair.

Timing matters. Police broadcast the detailed description at about 5 p.m. and circulated the sketch around 11 p.m.—before JJ’s photograph entered the investigation. Those contemporaneous records are the cleanest baseline for comparing what witnesses first remembered with what they said after repeated photo and lineup procedures.

A large response

Because Ward was a retired police officer, the NYPD established a field command post nearby. Dozens of officers conducted enforcement activity, issued summonses, made arrests, interviewed witnesses, and debriefed people in the area. Police also canvassed hospitals because Ward had fired his weapon and investigators initially believed one perpetrator might have been wounded.

Early related leads

Investigators learned of other unreported robberies at illegal numbers operations. One robbery on Fifth Avenue appeared similar, and a witness there reportedly recognized the person depicted in the wanted poster. The police-investigation page follows how that broad inquiry later narrowed around JJ.

The first-night record did not point in a single direction. One neighborhood resident said the composite resembled a man known as “Mustafa”; another supplied similar information; and later tips named “Shaq” and Victor Gibson. These were leads, not proof that any named person committed the murder. Their significance is that investigators had multiple avenues to test before the case centered on a man who did not match the original race and hair descriptions.

The New York Appellate Division’s published opinion supplies an official account of the crime, the early tips naming “Mustafa” and “Shaq,” the identification process, the trial, and the post-conviction litigation as it stood in 2016. The National Registry of Exonerations supplies the fuller chronology through dismissal of the indictment in 2024.