Moments after the judge convicted Sadir of involuntary manslaughter, Gussie's and Sadir's loved ones brawled fiercely outside the Criminal Justice Center.

Epithets and bodies flew across the pavement until the guards, who see this all the time, shooed them home.

Tanya Bullock's son Jarred, 16, died at the hands of best friend William Leon in May while the two were playing with guns. She was just as surprised as Favors that her son would be interested in weapons.

But she is as forgiving as Augustus Favors is furious.

"In a million years," says Tanya Bullock, "nobody could ever make me think he meant it. They were like brothers. If God could forgive me, who am I not to forgive William?"

William Leon, 15, had taken two guns from his uncle's collection to his buddy's Northeast home to show him. "But Jarred had a gun in his hand as well," his mother says. "It could just as easily have been his gun that went off."

Prosecutors initially pushed for first-degree murder, then backed off to third-degree. It couldn't have helped their case that, at a preliminary hearing, both boys' families sat together - on the defendant's side of the courtroom.

William Leon did as much as Sadir Reddy to make himself look guilty. Prosecutors say William warned a third boy - who was in the bathroom at the time of the shooting - not to snitch, and even dragged Jarred's bleeding body into the alley behind the house.

Yet Bullock, who credits the Leons - "a really nice, Christian family" - with helping to raise Jarred, thinks she knows why.

"He's a child," Bullock says of her son's killer. "I would panic, too."

Dreams of escape

Terrell Anderson, 16, pleaded with his mother, Angel, to get him out of their South Philadelphia neighborhood. But like so many other frightened families, they had nowhere to go.

Terrell was terrified even before a teen, apparently gunning for him, fired three bullets into his 17-year-old brother, Christopher, outside the family home at South 21st and Sigel in April.

"I'm sorry, that's not him," the young shooter blurted to a shocked Angel Anderson before running away.

His family says that after a dispute over a girl, Terrell had bested his nemesis in a fistfight - more than enough to get you killed in this part of town.

After Christopher was wounded, Angel told her boys that they couldn't go anywhere for the next two years.

Four days later, Terrell was told the feud was off. Elated, he went to meet friends and was gunned down within hours.

A grieving Angel Anderson still dreamed of moving - maybe to New Zealand, where she imagined her family on a farm. Or Chestnut Hill.

The Philadelphia Housing Authority offered her 44th and Brown. "Why move," she asks, "from one war zone to another?"

In October, Kyle Brown, 17 - Christopher's close friend, who lived four doors down - was gunned down while hanging out with friends. Kyle's older brother had been killed in May.