Man Sentenced to 25 Years in Killing of Girls Basketball Star The mother said when she hears music she still turns around, expecting to see her daughter there, dancing. When the girl's father goes to basketball games, she said, he still finds himself searching the court for No. 15, their daughter's number. "You took away something that wasn't yours to take," the mother, Tephanie Holston, said to the man convicted of killing her daughter. You robbed the world. You robbed the family. And you didn't have the right to do that. Ms. Holston spoke on Wednesday at the sentencing of Tyshawn Brockington, who was convicted earlier this month of killing her daughter, Tayshana Murphy, a high school basketball star. Justice Thomas Farber sentenced Mr. Brockington to 25 years to life in prison, the maximum. Ms. Murphy was shot on Sept. 11, 2011, in a hallway of the Grant Houses, where she lived with her mother and siblings, the victim of a day of escalating street fights in Harlem between the young men of the Grant and the nearby Manhattanville Houses, another public housing project. According to prosecutors, two men associated with Manhattanville - Mr. Brockington, 23, and Robert Cartagena, 22 - said they went to the Grant Houses about 4 a.m. that day looking to "smoke somebody" as retribution for beatings they had taken earlier. "They were going hunting," said Jeffrey Levinson, an assistant district attorney. Tayshana Murphy was a pawn in a stupid battle. Mr. Levinson said Mr. Brockington, who declined to speak during the brief proceeding, posted a message to Facebook shortly after Ms. Murphy was killed that said, "Ville up ho," which the prosecutor described as a boast that the killing had put Manhattanville on top. Justice Farber of State Supreme Court in Manhattan choked up as he looked at Ms. Murphy's parents and said he could not imagine the pain of losing a child, or when that pain might ever subside. "This was a coldblooded execution," Justice Farber said. I can't think of any other way to describe it. The judge added that he found it "incredibly tragic" that neighboring groups of young people sought to boost their "self-worth by creating a sense of otherness with people who should be your brothers and sisters." "We are desperately in need of kinship rather than otherness," Justice Farber said. Ms. Holston expressed contempt for Mr. Brockington, calling him a "coward." "God gonna take care of you," she told him. And I pray to God that you get everything you deserve while incarcerated. She said her daughter, who would have graduated from high school the next June, was working toward playing basketball in college and professionally, and was promising to take the family along wherever the ride took her. Ms. Holston drew a distinction between people in her neighborhood engaged in pointless battles and people like her daughter, working hard for their dreams. "Too many around here fighting to die," she said. But other people fighting to live.