Two Pottstown men were like brothers. Loyalty to a street gang left one dead and the other in prison.

Tyshaun Harvey paused Friday to collect his thoughts before addressing Nahmer Baird’s family.

He apologized for shooting Baird, 22, in front of his brother, for being the source of his father’s mental anguish and sleepless nights. He professed to Montgomery County Court Judge William Carpenter that he was a different person than the man seen in rap videos bragging about killing rivals and selling drugs.

“It’s been a long two years, and I’ve been thinking about this every day,” Harvey said. “I’m nowhere near the right. I’m dead wrong. How did we get here?”

Deputy District Attorney Samantha Cauffman answered that question for him, moments before Harvey, 23, was sentenced to 23 to 46 years in state prison for Baird’s May 2022 murder.

The bullet that killed Baird was meant for his brother, Jamar, who had testified months earlier during the homicide trial of three members of Bud Gang Bitch, a Pottstown street gang that Harvey and the Baird brothers were also affiliated with, Cauffman said. Those three defendants, Jaquan Marquis Lee, Derrick Goins and Kyshan Scott Brinkley, were convicted of first-degree murder and are serving life sentences.

And Jamar Baird had committed what amounts to a cardinal sin in the gang world: Cooperating with police. It didn’t matter, the prosecutor said, that the Bairds and Harvey grew up together. It didn’t matter that the Baird family had taken Harvey, who grew up without a father, under their wing, feeding him and sheltering him when he needed a place to stay.

The gang and its code, she said, came first.

“He had every opportunity to take a multitude of tracks in life,” Cauffman said during Friday’s hearing. “He chose this. He chose ‘loyalty over everything,’ and he has to face the consequences of that decision.”

Harvey’s attorney, Jack McMahon, said that his client had accepted responsibility for his actions, having pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in May to spare Baird’s family “the trauma of a trial.”

On May 29, 2022, Harvey was tailing the Baird brothers in his Chrysler 300, working to keep up with his onetime friends as they tried to avoid him, surveillance footage from the area showed.

But when the Bairds’ Nissan Sentra got stopped behind another car blocking Locust Alley near West Street, Harvey got out of his vehicle and opened fire, striking the Sentra multiple times, according to the affidavit of probable cause filed for his arrest. Some of those shots hit Nahmer Baird, 22, who later died at Pottstown Hospital. Jamar Baird was uninjured.

McMahon denied that Jamar Baird’s testimony was the motive for his brother’s killing. He said Harvey had been threatened by the brothers, sent menacing pictures of his mother’s house, and had urine thrown in his face by Baird weeks before the shooting.

“The case was a tragedy for two families,” McMahon said after the hearing. “I still don’t believe it was a gang-related incident, I think it was more personal between the two of them, just because he was in a gang, doesn’t mean the motive was gang-motivated.”

But Carpenter, the judge, said he did not believe nor accept that explanation.

Harvey was seen on surveillance footage attending every day of the homicide trial that Baird testified at. He posted multiple times on Instagram praising Lee, Goins and Brinkley, calling for them to be freed. And he sent messages to his friends calling Baird a “rat” and saying he had lost all respect within BGB.

“By killing that witness, Mr. Harvey struck a serious blow to the criminal justice system,” said Carpenter, who had also presided over the trial that Baird testified in. “The process only works when people are willing to come forward.”

His past didn’t help prove his sincerity, according to Carpenter. Harvey committed a nearly identical shooting in 2021, when he fired at rivals in Pottstown. No one was hurt, but Harvey pleaded guilty to aggravated assault two years later, after being arrested for Baird’s death. He had been on parole in that case, prosecutors said, when he killed Baird.

After the murder, Harvey left the scene and abandoned his car near his home in Pottstown, prosecutors said. He fled his hometown with his girlfriend and their child, traveling first to Atlantic City and then beyond, cutting a route through North Carolina and Georgia before heading west.

Three months after the murder, U.S. Marshals caught up with Harvey in Susanville, Calif, a city near the state’s border with Nevada.

Montgomery County Detective Heather Long testified Friday that BGB has operated in various forms since 2010, and is responsible for multiple drug deals and murders in Pottstown. It recruits its members young, promising them the safety, self-respect and glory they often feel is missing from their lives.

The members promote the gang through rap music and accompanying videos, four of which were played in court Friday. Harvey and Jamar Baird were heavily featured in the three of them, throwing up gang signs and flashing weapons and stacks of money.

But the elder Jamar Baird, the father of the victim and his brother, said he had tried desperately to raise his sons differently. It saddens him, he said, to see a generation of young men who don’t understand the meaning of life, nor value it.

“Tyshaun, you were like my son, and you know that,” Baird said. “That’s what hurts me the most. I tried to raise y’all in a way so that we wouldn’t end up here.”