The idea that the world would end according to the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012 was a joke to many, but some practitioners of New Age theology took the prediction seriously. Steez felt that something was coming too, making references on Facebook to things like hatching, doomsday and a coming global paradigm shift. In early November, a few days after Hurricane Sandy struck New York, he met up with Jared Harari, one of his friends from elementary school. As they walked to a bus stop where they would say what would be their final goodbyes, Steez said something that gave his friend pause. “He said, ‘If the world doesn’t end, something really big is gonna happen and it’s gonna change our lives,’” says Harari. “I can still remember the way he said it. So it was running through my mind, What the fuck is gonna happen? I was just like, What the hell’s gonna happen?”

Steez had also been talking about a coming event that was going to affect everything, according to a good friend of his who lived in Los Angeles at the time, Linda Hansen. “It had to do with how it’s all going to change and how we’re going to have to be at peace with our spirits and see what is wrong and what is right,” says Hansen, of her phone conversations with Steez. “He said I’m trying to explain to you that there’s about to be a shift and even if you can’t hear me now, just remember there’s about to be one later.”

The last time Steez performed was at Public Assembly in Williamsburg on December 12, 2012. His set didn’t go well—Steez was drunk and apparently frustrated with the turnout, and he walked off the stage at one point. While shooting a video a few days later, Steez told Cinematic’s Jesse Rubin that he was done with the rap industry. “He honestly said a couple things to me that really concerned me at the shoot,” said Rubin. “Just the look in his eyes. He was just like, I’m just done with this shit.”

Around the last week of his life, Steez had even withdrawn from his closest friend at the time, Rey Sanchez. “He just didn’t give a fuck about anything anymore—he really, really didn’t care,” says Sanchez. “Before that it was like every day, Yo, let’s link up. After that it was like, Yeah, I’m just gonna to chill in my crib all day.”

Pro Era’s mixtape, PEEP: The aPROcalypse, came out on December 21st, but it did little to lift Steez’ spirits. According to his sister Tamara, Steez told his mother that day that he was worried about being under investigation for his 47 stickers, and that “the only way he would get rid of that whole situation [was] if he hurt himself.” “My mom was like, ‘No, no, no. You know you can’t do that,’” says Tamara.

That night, Pro Era had a party at the Stussy store in SoHo to celebrate the mixtape’s release, but Tamara says Steez didn’t even want to go until some of the Pros came in a car and picked him up. The event was jam-packed, but according to someone who was there, Steez’ mood never brightened. He blew up when someone asked him to sign a T-shirt and no one brought him a Sharpie. A couple of videos from the event show Steez looking completely dazed, slurring his words, eyes half-closed.

The next night, Steez and the group were at Premier Studios, the studio Cinematic was using in Midtown. One of the people present, who has asked to remain anonymous, says that Steez told some of the Pros that he was thinking of killing himself by jumping off the building where Cinematic had its offices. A handful of Pros tried to talk him out of it. “Nothing was working, says Sanchez. “Nothing. It was like too late. He made up his mind already.”

Nobody seems to know exactly what happened with Steez the next day. According to Tamara, Steez was home all day, but left the house in the evening. Mrs. Dewar had gone to sleep thinking her son was at home, according to Tamara, but awoke later that night, when one of the Pros showed up at the door, worried and looking for Steez. Mrs. Dewar immediately called a suicide hotline; a police report notes a call was placed around 12:15AM.

Hansen says she called Sanchez that night around 1AM as the worry about Steez began to spread. “She was like, ‘Go to Prospect Park, go to Prospect Park,’” Sanchez says. He sped out with a friend in a car, and met up with the rest of the Pros there. He said the group scoured the park in the dark for about an hour and a half. “We like split up looking for Steez, like, ‘Steez! Steez! Steez!’” says Sanchez.

Around that time, an NYPD detective showed up at the Dewar family’s door. Mrs. Dewar gave the officer some pictures of Steez, should they encounter him somewhere in the city. A couple hours later, the cops returned with the awful news: they had found her son’s body outside of a building in Manhattan. They said he had jumped in the moments after midnight. Shortly beforehand, Steez had texted Hansen, telling her that he was about to smoke. And at 11:54 PM, he had sent a message to Sherly Tejeda, another girl he was friends with: “Eye love you ;)” The NYPD told the family that Steez was found clutching a bible to his chest.

Steez had been as purposeful in his death as he had been in his life. The building cops say Steez jumped from, 40 West 23rd Street, was at the time a hip-hop hub, serving as the headquarters for apparel company Ecko’s magazine, Complex, and Cinematic, which had secured office space there through a deal with Ecko (both have since relocated). A guard at the building told me Steez was let in—he counted as an employee—and at some point walked up to the roof he used to freestyle on with his friends on better days. Witnesses reported seeing the body lying in the middle of the street shortly after midnight. Though it may be a coincidence, it’s worth noting that the numbers in the date—12/23/12—add up to 47.

Steez didn’t leave a note, but one of AmeriKKKan Korruption’s strongest tracks, “Dead Prez,” might be the closest he ever came to writing one. It is a beautiful rap song, a befuddling poem that alternates between his nostalgia for his younger days rapping with Jahkari Jack as kids and resignation about his entry into the adult world. The theme is summed up in its puzzling hook—either, I’m out for dead presidents, see or I’m out for dead presidency, depending on how you hear it—an aural illusion that conflates a plea for money with a plea for death. He seems to be saying that the two were the same to him. Referencing other prolific rappers who died young—2pac, Biggie and Eazy E—he ends by saying that he’d prefer to be killed than to sell out: Some people like to compromise for the dollar sign, but I had my mind aside/ I told Jack from the get that I’mma ride or die/ And I’d rather die by homicide/ Instead of goin’ out without a pride. He ends the track sounding weary of life, and wistful for his childhood with Jack. But I remember back in the days/ When we was goin’ through that Torch and Excalibur phase.

About nine months after Steez’ death, I visited Jack in Philadelphia at his apartment near Temple University, where he is a junior. We spent a few hours talking as the fall evening floated by. He had been home for the holidays when he was awoken by his sister and mother in the middle of the night before Christmas Eve. His father had died the year before, and he experienced a sinking feeling even before he heard the words come out of his mother’s lips: his best friend was dead. He went with his family to Brooklyn the day after Steez died, and says the silence about Steez’ death was disconcerting to those who cared about him. He didn’t understand why none of the big papers in the city had covered it, either. “It kind of says something about America that a black kid can die in the middle of New York City and no one would know what the fuck happened,” he says.

Even those headquartered in the building where it happened had little to report about what had transpired. “It saddens us to report that Jamal Dewar aka Capital STEEZ, a talented young rap artist from the Pro Era crew, died early this morning,” wrote Complex the next morning, noting that details about what exactly happened were “sketchy.” The blog for Cinematic was even less forthcoming, posting a single line of text as well as a picture and video of Steez. “Rest in peace STEEZ. Lighten one up for you bro… BEASTCOAST4EVER!” The members of Pro Era too, have largely refused to talk specifics about the death; a manager at Cinematic requested that I didn’t bring up the passing of Steez in interviews with any of the Pros.

On Christmas day, the Pro Era crew and some other close friends gathered at Mrs. Dewar’s house to pay their respects. After asking someone to play “Stars,” one of Steez’ songs that references his mother, Mrs. Dewar began crying, according to Hansen, who had traveled in from LA. The meeting soon became tense. Mrs. Dewar started questioning the Pros, asking them, When was the last time they saw or heard from Steez? Who was last with him? Why wasn’t the family alerted when the signs were becoming clear that something was wrong in the last couple of days of his life? Tamara says they were unsatisfied with the answers they got back from the kids. No one told them that Steez had alerted them that he was going to jump from the Cinematic building, she says.

The lack of information about Steez’ last hours has not been inconsequential; in the absence of facts, rumors have flourished—like one that the police had been following Steez around, perhaps because of the 47 controversy. The internet too, has been a hotbed of conspiracies: that Steez was killed by the Illuminati, or that someone in the industry wanted him dead. A YouTube user even made a bizarre, eight-minute documentary theorizing that Harlem rapper A$AP Rocky had something to do with it. Some of his close friends, most of whom accept that Steez took his own life, are willing to entertain the idea that perhaps he didn’t. Tamara says that the funeral home wouldn’t let them see Steez’ body, because it would have been too devastating for their mother, preventing the family from having a key piece of closure. “They showed her pictures of him, of how he looked and stuff like that,” says Tamara. “And that was it.”

One day this fall, I met with some of the Pros at a Caribbean restaurant in Bed-Stuy. Joey sauntered up to me and said, “My dude!” before walking back outside to find the rest of the joint he was smoking. Dessy Hinds arrived, fresh off of turning in a college paper on Oedipus. It hasn’t been the easiest year for Pro Era, and though they have been reluctant to speak about it in public, most say they are deeply troubled by the loss of their friend, the lone dark spot on a trajectory that has otherwise brought them nothing but success. Joey describes it as a loss of innocence. “It was like, something that I never had to deal with growing up,” he says. “Just losing a really good friend of mine at a young age, at a point where I didn’t really understand the world, I didn’t really understand myself—it shook me up a lot.” They all readily admit that Steez laid down the blueprint for their success. “What Steez did was give us hope,” says Kirk Knight. “We all had the same subject matters and way we thought in our brains. He just put a vision on the board for you to achieve it.” Says Joey, “I always felt like Steez was like a older version of me.”

Steez himself has finally been getting some of the attention that eluded him when he was alive. More people are listening to him—the Pros tell stories about people as far away as Los Angeles with 47 tattoos—and the video for “Free the Robots” has well over a million views on YouTube. Joey plans to put out an album Steez had been working on before he died, King Capital, some time next year.

This past summer, Pro Era headlined a show at the Knitting Factory in Williamsburg, returning to the stage where they played their first concert together as a group in April 2011. It hadn’t even been a year and a half since that first show, but the kids were light years ahead. They’d now toured the United States twice, and played festivals like Rock the Bells and Bumbershoot. Joey has sold out shows as far away as Croatia and Germany and is widely understood to be one of rap’s rising stars, an 18-year-old who has gotten accolades from Jay Z, who Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg calls “family” and who takes a car service most places he goes. As weed smoke poured out of the door backstage at the Knitting Factory, rappers began emerging into the stage lights—first the Underachievers, one of them wearing a hat that said “Indigo,” in block letters with a 47 on the side, and then Pro Era, who came out in twos, visibly amped up in front of the hometown audience. The teenagers jumped around on set. They led the crowd in a call-and-response of “Fuck police!” They played all the tracks they knew their fans wanted to hear, demurring only when Steez’ verses came, falling silent during the empty spaces where he would have been rapping.