In the early morning hours of March 31, 1991, Mia Sanders was attending an after-hours party in a basement on Fayston Street in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood when gunfire erupted. The party drew about 80 people; Sanders had gone with her boyfriend and was not identified as taking part in the gang dispute that produced the shooting. She was struck in the crossfire and died at the scene.

Investigators later tied the violence to a rivalry between the Big Head Boys and the Intervale Street Posse. Court evidence identified Craig Holliday and Jeffrey Mooltrey as members of the Big Head Boys and Nathaniel Rivers as a leader of the Intervale group. Rivers was shot while trying to reach the stairs and later died at a hospital; another person, James Whiteside, was wounded outside the residence. Ballistics and witness testimony indicated multiple shooters and at least three different handguns were fired.

Holliday and Mooltrey were indicted in 1996 and convicted by a jury on May 22, 1998, of two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Sanders and Rivers, plus related weapons charges; both received consecutive life sentences for the murder convictions. What details about the night might still help explain how an event meant as a social gathering became deadly for bystanders?