A tall, neatly bearded man in a pinstripe suit stepped to the microphone Monday, facing the judge. Also before the judge was a scruffy-bearded, handcuffed defendant in an untucked oxford shirt.

Mike in hand, Assistant District Attorney Turahn L. Jenkins pivoted to the courtroom gallery, his eyes wet with tears, and faced the mother of two slain sons.

"I just want to say I'm so sorry for what happened to your sons. Things like this aren't supposed to happen."

He then turned to the man beside him -- his first cousin Richard G. Cunningham -- and said, "Rich, we grew up like brothers and I love you. I always will love you," he said. Moments later, Mr. Cunningham was sentenced to two concurrent life terms for double homicide and four to eight years concurrent for burglary and conspiracy. For Mr. Jenkins, appearing in court as a family member, not the prosecutor, his personal and professional lives crashed head-on.

The rift in the two men's life paths was never so pronounced as it was last week.

The cousins grew up spending weekends and summers together in Braddock. Mr. Jenkins, 31, is godfather to Mr. Cunningham's 8-year-old son, Maliq, and he planned to have his 25-year-old cousin be the best man at his wedding. They came from a tight-knit, churchgoing family, in which generations of men -- a great grandfather, grandfathers and uncles -- had labored at the Edgar Thomson steel mill. For years, the sunny, quick-witted and unusually gracious duo had been inseparable.

Mr. Jenkins, who had three older sisters, vividly recalls going to Magee-Womens Hospital when he was 5 and holding baby Richie in his arms after he was born. From that day on, he thought of his cousin as his little brother. The pair shared a room at Richie's house the summer Turahn worked at Kennywood.

"He really looked up to me. He would just always want to spend time with me," Mr. Jenkins said. He'd take his cousin to the Monroeville Mall or play John Madden video football with him. They wrestled, lifted weights and shot hoops together. Soon, the older cousin recalled, "He was getting bigger and stronger and it was getting harder for me to beat him at basketball."

In all, there would be four male cousins who stuck together at family cookouts, picnics and yearly Kwanzaa celebrations. They played tackle football and had sleepovers, and Richie's mother busted them for walking along train tracks in Braddock.

Turahn would become a prosecutor, Richie a lifer at state penitentiary, and C.J. -- 20-year-old Charles J. Bowers -- would be placed on probation after a July conviction for receiving stolen property, but is holding down a job. The fourth cousin, Jonathan Hutson, who spent some time in jail on petty misdemeanor charges, would be shot and killed at 19 while playing a Madden video game at his North Braddock home with a friend, who also was killed.

It wasn't set in stone that Turahn would be the good kid of the bunch. Although he lived a calmer, more suburban life with his family in Monroeville, he ran astray of the law as a teenager.

"I wasn't always on the up and up myself. ... I was hanging with some not-so-good people myself in my late teens," said Mr. Jenkins, who these days is often mistaken on the street for Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin.

Turahn sold marijuana during his senior year at Gateway High School and again during his freshman year at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, though he never got busted for it.

One night, he and a carload of friends fled police and ended up spending the night behind bars in a Monroeville police lockup. A juvenile disorderly conduct charge would be swept from Turahn's record, but he never forgot how a police officer pistol-whipped his friend, leaving him a bloody mess.

He says now, "I never thought I'd be a prosecutor; that's like being a cop. All my experience with police was always confrontational." His opinion of police officers has become more nuanced since he began trying cases.

Richie was an outstanding athlete and made honor roll as a kid. He began working as a detailer at a local auto body shop as a young teen. When he cut up in school, Mr. Jenkins said, "I would always try to give him some redirection."

"When he first started getting into trouble, I would talk to him all the time. But I could tell I was getting on his nerves. He would complain and say I was acting like I was his father. But it was out of love. Slowly, I shut up."

When he became a father at 16, Richie confided in Turahn before he broke the news to his parents. Eventually, he dropped out of Woodland Hills High School and racked up a series of convictions for drugs, guns and assault. He also has a 3-year-old daughter, Taylor.

"Richie had an army of people that reached out to him -- all the men in the family and the men in the community, coaches, schoolteachers and church parishioners. He was just listening to the wrong people."

He was loyal to the rougher breed of kids he grew up with on Camp Avenue in Braddock. He says about a dozen of these friends were killed and a few went to prison for homicide. Then Jonathan Hutson, Richie and Turahn's cousin, who was playing video games with Richie a day before, was killed in 2005.

Turahn became a social worker, attended Duquesne University Law School, clerked at the public defender's office and landed a job prosecuting drug and gun cases, DUIs and attempted homicides in the trial division of the Allegheny County District Attorney's Office. He said he knows his cousin is "proud of me being a lawyer" even though he once prosecuted one of Richie's friends.

He credits his parents and Richie's father, a college graduate; his high school business teacher; and Jafari Haymon, a college resident assistant, with setting him on the path to responsible adulthood. "One of the biggest deterrents was I didn't want to break my mom's heart," he said.

As a lawyer, every chance he got he'd go to court to watch his boss and mentor, Deputy District Attorney Bruce Beemer, prosecute homicide cases. He knew he wanted to try homicides when he saw Mr. Beemer try a death penalty case. "That's all I wanted to do. That's when I saw the best lawyering because there's so much at stake."

Mr. Jenkins, who plans to go into private practice next month as a defense attorney, says, "A lot of the things I've learned about being a trial attorney are from watching him and the way he treats people. He's very patient, really smart and unassuming."

Mr. Beemer noted the humanity that Mr. Jenkins brought out in everyone around him, "We see so much tragedy in this building that you think could be averted if there were more people like Turahn Jenkins in people's lives."

Mr. Cunningham was in jail for drug and gun charges when he was arrested on charges that he helped gun down two brothers at a Penn Hills birthday party in 2005 after the party host refused to pay for strippers he'd hired.

Mr. Jenkins knew Mr. Beemer had been assigned the homicide cases for the other three defendants and called him when Mr. Cunningham was arrested. "He gave me his condolences" and "he kept me abreast about the whole process," he said.

"Bruce is like me. This is our job, it's not personal," he said.

Mr. Jenkins resisted the urge to look at discovery materials on the case, although they were readily available. Though he often talked to his cousin on the phone on Sundays when Mr. Cunningham called his godmother -- Mr. Jenkins' mother -- from the jail, he never delved into legal strategies or the particulars of the case.

The nonjury trial hit snags and dragged on for more than a year. Some days, he said, he would come to watch the testimony. But the first time, "I couldn't stay in the courtroom. I just broke down. It was awful. I just couldn't believe he was in that situation."

Then in July, Mr. Cunningham was convicted of two counts of second-degree homicide, burglary and conspiracy. Three other defendants had previously been convicted of the homicides and other related charges.

As he and other family members sat through the trial, Mr. Jenkins wanted to know what happened. Investigators had found Mr. Cunningham's palm print on an interior storm door of the house where the shooting took place. A witness thought she saw him with a gun, even though he was partly masked. The question they never talk about, and Mr. Jenkins often troubles over, is whether his cousin was armed and whether he shot anyone. "I don't know. I don't know if I want to know. It's a double-edged sword."

Mr. Jenkins says that, in nearly three years of prosecuting cases, "It's a good feeling when you're able to convict somebody that's clearly a threat to society." But now -- "It's a big mess, the fact that someone that I love is affiliated with something so heinous. It saddens me because the world outside of the family will only know Richie for that snapshot of time. There's nothing that can take that back."

He spoke at his cousin's sentencing because he wanted to express his condolences to Argie Lyerly, who lost two sons that night and lost another son in a separate homicide.

He says he also spoke out for Mr. Cunningham, "and of course, I forgive him for putting himself in that situation. Wherever he is I'm gonna be there. It's like a piece of me is going to be there with him."