The video showed a boy growing up – a student at Peter Burnett Elementary School, a Halloween ghoul, a little guy cutting a birthday cake, him at his First Communion, a teenager out on a date with a girl, a goofy shot with shades, a young man wearing a tie.

Played to Spanish music, while a courtroom crowded with family members wept, the presentation then came to a halt on a final shot: a picture of the program to 15-year-old Abel Alonso's funeral.

His mother addressed the courtroom Wednesday, in agony. She spoke on behalf of the dozens, inside the courtroom and out, on the day the murderer of her son would be sent to prison for the rest of his life.

"Now we are destroyed," Maria Alonso told the court through a Spanish interpreter.

Abel Alonso Sr. followed his wife to the front of the courtroom and stood behind Steven Duran, 24, the man convicted of the murder of his son at 8 o'clock in the morning on June 8, 2007, while the boy's brother was driving him to school.

The elder Alonso had broken into sobs moments earlier when the video showed a family picture of his smiling boy, looking about 8, gently holding the shoulder of a dad whose head was topped by a white cowboy hat.

"I think what we're going through is going to have an effect on our family, and also Steve's family," Alonso said, his comments also translated into English for the court. "I know he has children of his own. And I hope that God does not take one of his own someday, so that he will then understand the pain he has caused us."

In a trial that concluded on Oct. 20 with Duran's first-degree murder conviction, Deputy District Attorney Anthony Ortiz portrayed the defendant as a hard-core street gang member who could barely walk out of the house without wearing his Norteño red.

Ortiz said Duran had been up all night on methamphetamine and Ecstasy and was driving around town with a .38-caliber revolver in his lap on the morning of the murder when he saw a blue car heading down a side street in the Fruitridge area.

Inside the car, Bernardo Alonso and Abel Alonso Jr. were driving to Genesis Charter High School for their last-day-of-school ceremonies.

Inside his head, Duran's gang mindset burned at the vehicle's color, emblematic, in his way of thinking, of the rival Sureños set, Ortiz said.

He chased down the Alonso car and pulled up alongside it to the right, firing into the vehicle and killing a boy his mother said had "been full of life," had been "a happy kid," had "loved life."

Duran's lawyer, Michael Wise, said his client thought Abel's older brother helped shoot up the defendant's mother's house in 2004. Deputy DA Ortiz said Bernardo Alonso had some associations with Sureños but was not a gang member himself, and that he had nothing to do with the house shooting.

Ortiz said Abel Alonso was an innocent victim.

About a dozen friends and family of Duran's attended the sentencing. None of them spoke.

Duran, however, offered an apology in his brief remarks to the court.

"I apologize to the victim's family for their loss and my family for the loss of me," Duran said, "because I'm going to be gone for the rest of my life."

Then came the video, while tears flowed freely and sobs filled the side of the courtroom where the Alonso friends and family sat and stood. The younger ones wore T-shirts with Abel's picture on it, one with him in headphones. An inscription on the shirt read, "Te extrañnamos, L'il Abel," Spanish for "We miss you."

Some of the courtroom's burly bailiffs bit their lips when Maria Alonso spoke.

She said her life since her son's death has been "a living hell, full of pain."

"My son did not deserve this ugly way to die," she said. "He was a kid. He couldn't even go out by himself yet."

Judge Lloyd Connelly worked through the terms of the sentencing, giving Duran his expected life term without possibility of parole, adding another 25-to-life for a gun enhancement and a third 15-to-life term for the attempted murder of Bernardo Alonso, plus another 20 years for a gang enhancement.

He ordered Duran to pay $10,000 restitution.

The judge called the moment "so hard," the murder "a horribly stupid, foolish crime." He said as a result of Duran's actions, "his children won't have a father, his mother won't have a son." He said he took "no pleasure" in his actions, but that the law had to be "properly harsh."

Then Connelly turned to the Alonso family. "To you folks," Connelly said, before he halted to catch a voice that had already cracked.

"I hope that in some way," he said, through reddened eyes, "justice here gives you some comfort for the loss you have suffered."

Call The Bee's Andy Furillo, (916) 321-1141.