Teens in West Philly went from brothers to enemies. A trial offered a window inside a lesser-known feud.

The boys were all friends, brothers even, before they started shooting one another.

They spent their days in the early to mid-2010s as most kids from the Bottom in West Philadelphia did: riding bikes, playing basketball, getting into fights on the playground.

They started calling themselves the “Get Chicken Gang,” and neighborhood police said they would soon see the name across their social media profiles: GCG.

But immature disagreements ultimately divided them and led to the creation of a new collection of street groups — and enemies — in the neighborhood. A yearslong, bloody gang feud followed that police said blanketed the area in shootings during the pandemic.

A trial this month for the 2021 murder of 22-year-old Joseph Johnson offered rare insight into how authorities believe one of those lesser-known feuds began and ultimately spiraled: one between the Young Bag Chasers, or YBC, and the young men from 38th and Wallace Streets.

The case against Walter Kegler, the 38th Street member accused of killing Johnson, a YBC affiliate, over a perceived slight, came together at the height of the city’s gun violence crisis and in a resource-depleted neighborhood where dozens of young men were shooting one another in wars driven, in part, by the rise of drill rap music and the use of social media.

In the Bottom, YBC was often at the center of it all.

» READ MORE: The rise and fall of the Young Bag Chasers

Violence in Philadelphia has since fallen to one of the lowest levels seen in the last 50 years, but the lingering impact of three years of record-setting bloodshed remains — and the often murky, ambiguous storylines behind the shooters and victims continue to play out in city courtrooms today.

Kegler’s trial is one.

Assistant District Attorney Jeff Hojnowski said the feud between YBC and 38th Street escalated in early 2021, after a YBC member spat on the sister of someone from 38th Street.

The 38th Street guys then jumped the kid from YBC, he said, and that day, bullets were sprayed down 38th and Wallace. No one was shot or arrested, he said, but YBC was suspected of firing the shots.

“From there, it began,” Lt. Edwin Perez, a patrol officer in the neighborhood during the height of the feuds, told the jury. “Back and forth. Back and forth.”

Perez had spent years in the 16th Police District, which encompasses the neighborhoods of Mantua and West Powelton, and was one of multiple officers who monitored the area’s gang members online.

He had somewhat of a cat-and-mouse relationship with the teens, talking to them on the corners about staying out of trouble, then chasing them down for crimes. They played the game, too, he said, creating fake Instagrams named after him and sometimes shouting him out on their Instagram Lives.

Perez told jurors that he had known Kegler for most of his life, before he started going by “SB” or “Silverback.” He knew Kegler’s older brothers, and remembered when he was a chubby 10-year-old with “Fat Tone” scribbled on the side of his Timberlands.

So when he saw the Ring camera footage of Johnson’s killing, he said, he quickly recognized Kegler as the shooter.

Johnson spent his early childhood years in South Philly before moving to the 3200 block of Brandywine Street in Mantua. His family could not be reached for an interview, but in court, his mother described him as a loving and funny brother and son. His nickname was “Gorilla Joe.”

But he was also caught up in the environment around him, and in 2016, Hojnowski said, Johnson and a friend were arrested for a gunpoint carjacking.

Johnson, 17 at the time, was charged as an adult and sentenced to two to seven years in prison.

Because the friend, who was a few years younger and from 38th and Wallace, was charged as a juvenile and received a lesser sentence, Johnson suspected he had given information to the police. (Hojnowski said he hadn’t.)

So when Johnson was released from custody in 2021, Hojnowski said, he labeled his codefendant — his former friend — as a rat, and started spreading the word that 38th and Wallace couldn’t be trusted.

From there, he said, Johnson had a target on his back.

Johnson was sitting on the steps of his rowhouse looking at his phone, around 10 a.m. on Sept. 22, 2021, when a white car pulled up and two gunmen jumped out. They shot him nine times before he could run inside.

Residents on the block said they hadn’t seen anything. There were no other surveillance cameras nearby, police said. The blurry Ring video from Johnson’s home was all investigators had to work with.

But to the officers who knew Kegler, it was clear enough, they said in court.

The footage showed that when Kegler killed Johnson, he was wearing the same black Armani Exchange pants and Yeezy shoes as when he shot a 20-year-old in the leg at 40th and Chestnut Streets the month prior, Detective Ryan Moore recounted in court.

Moore said he knew Kegler was at that earlier shooting because he dropped his phone as he fled.

Then, Hojnowski said, a few weeks after killing Johnson, Kegler and another 38th Street member took to Instagram Live to mock YBC.

Kegler and the friend used Johnson’s nickname and said he “should’ve ducked.” They questioned how he could be sitting outside on his phone in the “middle of a war,” and said they were coming for one of the mothers of a YBC member next.

Kegler stood up and moved his body as if he was being shot.

Then, he said: “[He] looked me dead in my eyes.”

“That was a confession,” Hojnowski told the jury.

Kegler was arrested in the same distinctive track pants and shoes he wore during the shootings, the prosecutor said.

The second shooter involved in Johnson’s killing remains unidentified and at large.

Throughout the trial, Kegler denied any role in the crimes. He even took the stand to try to plead his innocence. There are a million people in Philly who wear those clothes, he told the jury. It wasn’t him.

“I never committed no murder. I never shot anyone,” he repeated.

Johnson, he said, “was like my big brother.” And 38th and Wallace, he said, was no gang.

“Just ’cus you’re from somewhere and have friends doesn’t mean you’re a gang,” he said.

Hojnowski questioned who, then, he was talking about on the Instagram Live.

Kegler wouldn’t say. He just shook his head.

By the end of the trial, Kegler’s attorney, Gary Server, emphasized that there were no independent eyewitnesses. Building a case on police intelligence alone carries “a high risk of inaccuracy,” he said.

As for the Instagram video, he said: “We should be morally outraged when we hear people laughing about someone’s death. But that doesn’t mean they’re responsible for it.”

After about five hours of deliberations, the jury moved to convict Kegler of all crimes, including first-degree murder, conspiracy, attempted murder, and related crimes.

Kegler’s grandfather told him he loved him. And Kegler, in his final words to the court, said he was sorry that this had happened to Johnson’s family. He maintained that he was innocent, and that Johnson was a friend.

But his fate was sealed. Common Pleas Court Judge Roxanne Covington sentenced Kegler, 22, to the mandatory life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 20 to 40 years for the nonfatal shooting in University City.

As the sentence was read, Kegler was mostly calm. Stoic.

But once he was walked out of the courtroom, taken by sheriffs into the holding cell out of public view, he wailed.