  The hump-backed plateau of the single inclusive distribution of hadrons
inside a jet provides a standard test of the interplay between probabilistic
parton splitting and quantum coherence in QCD. The medium-induced modification
of this QCD radiation physics is expected to give access to the properties of
the dense medium produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions. Here, we
introduce a formulation of medium-induced parton energy loss, which treats all
leading and subleading parton branchings equally, and which - for showering in
the vacuum - accounts for the observed distribution of soft jet fragments. We
show that the strong suppression of single inclusive hadron spectra measured in
Au-Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) implies a
characteristic distortion of the hump-backed plateau; we determine, as a
function of jet energy, to what extent the soft jet fragments can be measured
above some momentum cut. Our study further indicates that the approximate
pT-independence of the measured nuclear modification factor does not exclude a
significant Q^2-dependence of parton energy loss.
