On the evening of September 10, 2011, Taylonn Murphy took the subway to West Harlem to visit his eighteen-year-old daughter. He found her sitting on a bench, joking with her friends, in front of the building where she lived with her mother. “I need to talk to you,” he said, as he walked past her into the lobby. “When you get a chance, come upstairs.” It was a Saturday, two days after the start of her senior year, and she would likely stay out late, but he didn’t mind waiting. He had news that he knew she’d want to hear: a basketball scout from the University of Tennessee was coming to watch her play.

His daughter’s name was Tayshana—she had been named for him—but everybody knew her by her nickname, Chicken. She had hazel eyes, a contagious grin, a powerful build, and, on the inside of her right forearm, a tattoo of a basketball, with the words “It’s not a game, it’s my life.” She had missed the prior season, after tearing her A.C.L. and undergoing knee surgery. But she had begun playing again, and ESPN’s HoopGurlz had just named her the sixteenth-best female point guard in the nation. Now she was hoping to win a basketball scholarship and become the first member of her family to get a college degree.

Chicken lived with her mother, her two brothers, her sister, and her sister’s baby, in a fifteenth-floor apartment at 3170 Broadway, just below 125th Street, near where the subway emerges onto an overhead track. The building is part of a large public-housing project called the General Ulysses S. Grant Houses, situated a few blocks north of Columbia University. Murphy was separated from Chicken’s mother, Tephanie Holston, but he came by often to visit. That evening, he went into Chicken’s room and sat on her bed, surrounded by her basketball trophies. He took a couple of painkillers, to ease an ache in his neck and his back incurred in a recent car accident, and then, without intending to, he fell asleep.

Shortly after four o’clock the next morning, he awoke suddenly to hear his sixteen-year-old son, Taylonn, Jr., shouting, “They just shot Chicken!” Outside the apartment, Murphy heard screams coming from the stairwell. He ran down eleven flights, and found Chicken lying in a pool of blood in the hallway. Her sister, Tanasia, was hugging her and wailing, “Wake up! Wake up!” Somebody was shouting into a cell phone, pleading with a 911 operator to send help quickly. But, to Murphy, it looked as if his daughter was already dead.

She had, in fact, died almost immediately, after being shot three times, in the wrist, the hip, and the chest. A few hours later, a worker from the city medical examiner’s office placed Chicken’s body into a canvas bag and wheeled her out of the building on a gurney. Her mother walked alongside, one hand clutching the gurney’s metal frame. Murphy followed several steps behind, his eyes fixed on the ground.

In the days after the shooting, Murphy stayed at the apartment, answering calls from friends, relatives, coaches, school officials, and reporters. Weeping teen-agers came by at all hours, and Murphy did his best to comfort them. More than a hundred surveillance cameras monitor the Grant Houses, and soon the police had identified two suspects. One of them, Robert Cartagena, age twenty, had grown up in a housing project called the Manhattanville Houses, a block away, on the other side of 125th Street; the second suspect, Tyshawn Brockington, twenty-one, lived nearby. TV news shows broadcast their photographs, but nobody seemed to know where they were.

A wake was held at 6 p.m. on September 16th, at a funeral home in Queens, not far from the Queensbridge Houses, the project where Chicken had lived between the ages of three and fourteen. Murphy expected a few hundred mourners, but Chicken had been known throughout the city, and some three thousand people came. Teen-agers crowded along the sidewalk, chanting her name, and some wore laminated pictures of Chicken on chains around their necks. Murphy saw people he didn’t even recognize try to cut the line, claiming, “That’s my cousin!” The wake was supposed to end at nine, but it went on until almost midnight.

The burial was the next day, in New Jersey, and afterward the family attended a vigil that a friend organized in Queensbridge. Several hundred young people, holding white candles, stood around the perimeter of the basketball court where Chicken had played nearly every day of her childhood. Murphy had grown up playing basketball, too. Now forty-two, he approached a lectern on the side of the court with the weary gait of an aging athlete. He has a thin mustache that runs to the base of his chin, and large eyes behind square-frame glasses. He was still wearing his funeral clothes: black jacket, black tie, and black fedora.

“I don’t even know how I got through the last week,” he said. “I was supposed to be starting to take Tayshana to visit different schools. . . . I mean, it was crazy, because she was, like, ‘Pop, we’re finally on the same page!’ I said, ‘Yeah, we finally are on the same page.’ We were so much alike, we just bumped heads for years. And that’s only because I wanted the best for her.” Murphy paused, then added, “I didn’t want my kids to go through the things that I went through.” He didn’t elaborate, but people knew that he was referring to run-ins with the police and time in jail. Looking out at the crowd of teen-agers, he added, “I know you might be upset. I know there might be some pent-up anger. But please don’t go out and do anything in the name of Chicken.”

Ever since his daughter’s murder, friends and acquaintances had been asking Murphy, “What do you want to do?” They were asking him how he wanted to avenge her death, and he had thought about it; when he saw a police officer handing out wanted posters, Murphy told him, “You better find these guys before we do.” Then he got a call from a childhood friend, who lived in Columbia, South Carolina. The friend knew that criminals wanted in New York often fled to the South, and he had asked Murphy to send him photos of the suspects. Murphy e-mailed a link to a news story, and his friend shared it with people he knew. A few days after Chicken’s funeral, the friend called again, to say that someone had seen the suspects. Murphy was stunned. He wondered if it could be true and, if so, what he should do about it. Later, he told me, “I fought with myself through that whole night: ‘Am I going to do this? Am I going to go down there?’ ”

The next morning, before he could decide, a detective called: the suspects had been found, in Columbia. They were extradited to New York, and arraigned in a courthouse downtown. From their photographs, Murphy had assumed that they were “real killers and gangsters.” But, when he saw them, he says, “These guys were babies. Small in stature. Baby faces.” He asked himself, What am I going to do with these little guys?