on an 80-degree morning earlier this fall, Assistant District Attorney Cydney Pope and Detective Joe Murray made their way to Courtroom 304, a stuffy, windowless box with gray walls inside the Justice Juanita Kidd Stout Center for Criminal Justice.

Jury selection was scheduled to begin on the first day of Michael Lockhart's trial for attempted murder. Murray figured he wouldn't need to take the stand to testify for another day or two, so he wore a dark zip-up jacket instead of his usual tailored suit. Pope was in a dark-blue blouse and skirt.

In the two years since Lockhart was arrested, a lot happened — and a lot didn't happen.

The disappearance of those weapons set in motion a wave of senseless violence.

Murray's uncle Dennis, the former Homicide Unit sergeant, had died in August the year before after a long, brutal battle with cancer. Dennis and his wife, Mary Anne, were Joe's godparents, and close to their nephew. Mary Anne knew Joe longed to be in Homicide, but she worried about the unforgiving nature of the job. Uncle Dennis, meanwhile, would needle him: Joe, when are you going to Homicide?

As for Pope, no matter how many text message threads she and Murray reviewed or statements they took, she couldn't figure out what became of the three guns that had been stolen in 2015 from Jerry "Boog" Brooks, the head of a small West Philly drug gang. The disappearance of those weapons set in motion a wave of violence.

What Lockhart did with them was anybody's guess; he never offered any answers. ATF officials said they didn't have the guns.

The bigger question, though, was why Lockhart had taken the guns in the first place, and then helped to frame three innocent men: Lawrence Downs, Hassan Williams, and Kashif Love.

That answer seemed to be tied up in the grand riddle of Michael Lockhart himself, the boy who grew up wanting to build a different legacy than his father, yet felt compelled to follow the same dangerous path; the young man who spent his days preaching about the ills of gun violence in North Philly and his nights plotting murders in West Philly, all the while dancing with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.