A South Philly neighborhood was awash in retaliatory gunfire. A recent trial showed the human cost.

To hear Nyseem Smith tell it, shooting people was something of a pastime for him and his friends in South Philadelphia.

Week after week, sometimes day after day, Smith said, he and his crew from 31st Street would fall into a familiar routine: They’d steal a car, hop in with guns they all shared, then go looking for rivals to shoot.

Sometimes, he said, they’d seek out young men associated with 27th Street, another neighborhood group. Other times, they’d look for people who lived around the nearby Wilson Park apartments.

The cycle of violence — sometimes chronicled on Instagram — became virtually impossible to extinguish. And by the time investigators caught up with Smith in 2019, he confessed to a staggering array of crimes.

All told, he said, during a 13-month stretch when he wasn’t in jail or on house arrest, he participated in shootings that left at least 17 people wounded and one man dead.

Still, when asked why he and a generation of young men believed that the conflict was worth such bloodshed, his reply, almost nonchalant, consisted of just five words:

“We don’t like each other.”

Smith’s account took center stage at a Philadelphia murder trial this month when he served as a star witness against two men charged in the shooting death of 15-year-old Rasul Benson, an unintended target killed at a gas station in 2017 amid the long-running neighborhood conflict.

The defendants — Hanef Wilkins, 22, and Yameen Mofield, 21 — were convicted of third-degree murder and related crimes, largely due to the testimony of Smith, 25, who spoke in a dry staccato from the witness stand and wore a surgical mask that covered nearly his entire face.

He said Wilkins and Mofield — who, like him, were associated with 31st Street — told him they’d killed the teen because they were targeting people from 27th Street who were also at the station pumping gas. Aspects of Smith’s statement were corroborated by cell phone records, prison phone calls, and ballistics evidence.

Lawyers for Wilkins and Mofield sought to cast Smith as a liar and unreliable narrator. They repeatedly stressed to the jury that he was offered a plea deal with a prison sentence of just five to 20 years — far short of the maximum he could have faced for his extended crime spree.

“The Nyseem Smith you saw here was a commonwealth robot,” said Wilkins’ lawyer, Richard J. Giuliani. “What he told you wasn’t true. It simply wasn’t true.”

Beyond his testimony in this case, Smith spoke to authorities at least 17 times after his arrest. And his statements provided an exceedingly rare glimpse into the type of recurring violence that can take hold in the city. Although hundreds of shootings every year go unsolved, in part due to a lack of cooperating witnesses, Smith’s statements helped investigators solve at least 10 additional crimes, said Assistant District Attorney William Fritze, head of the office’s Gun Violence Task Force.

Smith often implicated himself, Fritze said. And his testimony did not come without risk. His statements were leaked online, where he was called a rat, and Fritze said Smith has been moved to different prisons due to safety concerns. In addition, when Smith testified at trial earlier this month, Fritze said, agents had to bring him to and from the courthouse alone — instead of on a bus carrying other prisoners — to ensure that he wouldn’t be attacked.

His role in convicting Wilkins and Mofield was perhaps the last significant action in a sprawling, yearslong investigation that sought to disrupt the conflict between 31st Street, 27th Street, and Wilson Park. Nearly 20 people have now been convicted for their roles in gunfire that left at least 30 people wounded and three dead, Fritze said. And only two cases remain pending, both of which he said are expected to result in guilty pleas in the coming weeks.

For a time, Jackee Nichols, Benson’s grandmother, said she felt as if Benson’s killing — which took several years to solve — had been forgotten. But shortly after the verdict was delivered Wednesday, she said she was grateful for some measure of justice.

“I got more than most families and victims ever get,” she said.

Smith, during his time on the stand, hardly resembled the type of charismatic star witness brought in to charm juries in movies or on television shows. He spoke softly, almost mumbling, and although he was asked dozens of questions over nearly two days, he routinely answered by saying only “yes” or “no.”

Still, he offered some insight into his background, saying he took to the streets of South Philly about age 12 or 13 — selling drugs, carrying guns, and stealing cars. He said people in the crew from 31st and Tasker Streets would routinely share and trade firearms, and often tried to sell the stolen vehicles to chop shops in Southwest Philadelphia.

But in 2017, he told investigators, his crimes grew more serious.

That December, he said, he participated in two shootings in two days, including the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Nasir Livingston at a Chinese takeout at 27th and Dickinson Streets. Smith said he didn’t shoot Livingston, but was in a car driving around with friends as they were looking for him. They decided to shoot Livingston because he was an affiliate of 27th Street, Smith said.

Three months later, in February 2018, Smith said, he participated in four shootings in less than three weeks, including one on the 2700 block of Reed Street. In that case, Smith said, he and other 31st Street members were targeting a member of 27th Street because “he talks a lot.”

But they hit a bystander — a 59-year-old nurse who was shot in the crossfire. She survived.

“I felt bad for her,” Smith said on the stand, an assertion that lawyers for Wilkins and Mofield sought to pick apart during cross-examination.

In March 2018, Smith was arrested and jailed for possessing a gun. But he posted bail a few months later. Not long after that, he said, he participated in a triple shooting on the 1600 block of South Marston Street.

And near the end of 2018, he said, he led police on a high-speed chase from Grays Ferry into West Philadelphia after authorities noticed he was driving a stolen car. He was not caught.

On March 6, 2019, Smith was arrested again — this time charged with the Marston Street shooting.

As he sat in jail to await trial, he decided to speak to police.

By late 2019, Benson’s murder had been unsolved for more than a year. The wait gnawed at Nichols, his grandmother.

From the beginning, she believed Benson had been killed as part of the back-and-forth violence in the neighborhood. Benson wasn’t part of the 27th Street crew, but he knew people who were. And on the night he was shot — Oct. 4, 2018 — he was with two friends at the Gulf station on Passyunk Avenue near 25th Street, pumping gas for tips.

Surveillance video played at the trial showed a car pulling in to the station about 8 p.m. A gunman got out of the back seat and chased one of Benson’s friends through the parking lot. Another shooter fired from the back seat of the car.

It was all over within seconds. The gunman got back into the car and was driven away.

Benson was struck in the chest and declared dead at the hospital. The two other teens were shot but survived.

As her grandson’s case languished without an arrest, Nichols struggled to get through basic tasks without experiencing painful memories. And she occasionally encountered people on the street who she was convinced knew who’d killed Benson.

It wasn’t until Smith began talking that the investigation started to heat up.

In a statement given in early 2020, Smith told police that Wilkins and Mofield had come to his house after the crime and confessed. Mofield was panicking, Smith said, saying he’d dropped his phone at the scene.

Evidence discovered later appeared to corroborate portions of Smith’s account, Fritze said. And Fritze told jurors that some of the details would have been impossible for Smith to have known or made up when he spoke to investigators.

One example: Smith said Wilkins and Mofield came to his house with two other people, and one of them — a teen Smith called Markelle — had not been on law enforcement’s radar before that. But cell phone records later showed that Markelle (who was never charged) had called Mofield an hour before the killing, according to trial testimony. And Markelle had deleted all of his messages in the hours surrounding the crime.

Smith’s statement was not without issues. Mofield, for example, had not actually dropped his phone at the gas station. Prosecutors acknowledged that cell phone records showed his device leaving South Philadelphia later that night. But they said he could have dropped a second phone. And they pointed to a recorded prison phone call, placed just days after the slaying, in which two other 31st Street members — neither of them Smith — talked about Mofield, and said he was worried that he’d dropped his phone at the crime scene.

Fritze contended this was corroboration for what Smith had told police. Mofield’s lawyer, Robert Gamburg, meanwhile, sought to cast Smith’s statement as little more than unverified gossip, saying Smith was happy to tell investigators whatever they wanted to hear if it would spare him from receiving the equivalent of his own life sentence.

“This is how rumors get started,” Gamburg told the jury. “This is how rumors spread.”

But Fritze said prosecutors had sought to verify Smith’s account line by line. And he said Smith — who faced significant danger for speaking up — never professed to be testifying for anything other than a chance at getting out of jail before he’s an elderly man.

“He pointed the finger at his boys over and over again,” Fritze said.

Wilkins and Mofield are scheduled to be sentenced by Common Pleas Court Judge Charles Ehrlich in October. Nichols and her family plan to attend and tell the judge about the pain of losing Benson.

Fritze said the scale and scope of this investigation is unlike any other he’s handled in his career. And moving forward, he said, one thing will stick with him above all.

“We gave Rasul’s family an answer,” he said.