They descended upon him with punches and kicks and nine thrusts of a knife, a blur of violence so vicious that the victim was propped up at one point so the beating could go on. The young men who attacked Dorchester musician Charleston Sarjeant on that drizzly Wednesday, April 22, 1992, left him in pooling blood on the floor of a fried chicken joint, and ran from the screams of a wife and mother becoming a widow.

Boston was much more violent then, 25 years ago, near the beginning of the crack epidemic. The city averaged 100 ­homicides annually from 1988 to 1995, about double the rate of the past eight years. But even in the blood-soaked early ’90s, Sarjeant’s murder stood out for its shocking pointlessness.

The attack rewrote the destinies of everyone involved, and it remains a powerful force even now, reaching out from the past to shape the present.

For Sarjeant’s widow, Debra Smith, a ­youthful-looking 48, questions about her other life — the one she did not get to live — well up each spring near the anniversary of the murder.

“I start thinking back, thinking what would be if he were alive now,’’ she said. “How he would be. What he would be doing. What would we be doing? You think about what could be.’’

Inside Old Colony Correctional Center, in Bridgewater, Dirceu Semedo is also thinking of what could have been. He is one of five men sentenced to life for killing Sarjeant. He said in an exchange of letters with the Globe that he is “deeply ashamed’’ of his involvement in the crime.

“I do feel a great deal of regret,’’ said Semedo, who is 43 and has been in prison since he was 18. “I wish my life had been different. I wish I had a chance to be a father. I wish I could fall in love and get married. . . . I can only think of these things briefly because regret is dangerous in this place.’’

“I have seen men go mad in here because of regret.’’

Ordinary encounter turns fateful

Looking backward from a tragedy, lots of ordinary things seem like prophecies.

The last band rehearsal Debra attended with Charlie, as he was known, has haunted her for 25 years. The couple played together in a big funk and blues band called Blade, which had been getting bookings at local clubs. Music was one of the many things they had in common. Debra and Charlie had each come to the United States with their families at age 5, Debra from Trinidad and Charlie from Barbados. Both grew up Jehovah’s Witnesses. They started dating when Debra was in 10th grade, and they married in 1986, when she was 18 and he was 20. By the spring of 1992, they were in Dorchester raising three children, ages 5, 3, and 1.

In that last rehearsal, the band spent hours learning “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,’’ a Bob ­Dylan song covered by Guns N’ Roses in 1990.

Charlie, one of the percussionists, did not play that night, Debra remembers. She recalls him watching the rehearsal while framed within a doorway. It is the image she sees in her mind whenever she hears that song.

After rehearsal, near midnight, Charlie, Debra, and the bass player, Ed Toomer, stopped for fish and chips at the Tasty Chicken restaurant, a takeout place in Uphams Corner.

They could not have known the restaurant owners had ongoing friction with a group of young men in the neighborhood. The men were not a gang as commonly defined, but they sold drugs on the street and had been kicked out of the restaurant in the past.

Details of what happened next vary a little among different accounts. Most agree that somebody threw a beer bottle against the outside of the Tasty Chicken. A leader of the young men, James Villaroel, then about 21, entered with a boombox radio playing a new Public Enemy song, “Shut ’Em Down.’’ He might have yelled “Let’s shut it down,’’ or something like that. He was high on marijuana laced with cocaine.

Sarjeant was 5 foot 10 and a slim 150 pounds. Witnesses said Villaroel ran up to him and — inexplicably — smashed the boombox over his head.

Villaroel would later claim he mistook Sarjeant for an old enemy. “It just happened,’’ he said at trial, speaking of the attack. “I still don’t know why I did it.’’

Others jumped in, punching and stomping. Villaroel drew a knife and started stabbing.

Debra screamed for them to stop. She screamed for the police. She screamed, “Why him?’’ She recalls praying, and a weird out-of-body sensation, as if she was outside watching herself watch the attack.

“It seemed,’’ she said, “like it took forever.’’

Sarjeant bled out and died. He was 25.

Seven young men were indicted. Two were acquitted. Five were convicted: Villaroel; Semedo; Aristides Duarte, 17 at the time of the crime; Adriano Barros, 18; and Lamar Johnson, 24.

They were sentenced to life without parole, spreading the fallout through five more families.

Duarte’s mother collapsed after the verdict. She was taken away on a stretcher, while her son was taken to prison. Duarte was born in Cape Verde and came to the United States with family in 1980, when he was about 5. By age 13, he was selling crack cocaine. He dropped out of school in ninth grade.

Twelve days before Sarjeant’s murder, Duarte had become a father. At first, the baby’s mother brought the infant to prison every week. But the visits grew further apart, and then they stopped. Duarte said at a 2014 hearing that he had last seen his son in 1997, when the child was 5.

It was as his codefendant Semedo says: “No one living life on the outside can sustain the emotional energy that it takes to love and care for someone doing life. How can you maintain without hope?’’

Left to pick up the pieces

Debra was alone at 23, with three little kids.

She quit playing her steel drums. Her band broke up. It just couldn’t go on. Former Blade member Bill Homans, 67, who still tours under his blues name, Watermelon Slim, said he keeps the 25-year-old invitation to Charlie’s funeral in a curio cabinet in his Mississippi den. He takes it out sometimes and remembers Charlie as “a very nice cat, a gentle cat.’’

Not only was Debra destined to live a different life after the murder, but she would live it as a different person.

“It definitely changed me,’’ she said. “It changed my whole personality.’’ The crime “hardened’’ her, made her suspicious. It takes a long time for someone to work into her circle of trust. That’s why she has lots of acquaintances but few close friends. “I’m probably permanently going to be that way.’’

It took about eight years before her desire to play music came back. She eventually found a new romantic relationship and had two more children, now 16 and 11, but didn’t remarry until four years ago. For years, she didn’t feel ready.

These days, she lives in Lowell and works on Holland America cruise ships, playing steel drums and singing in a one-woman show. She plays local venues, too, such as Bahama Breeze in Tyngsborough, under the stage name Sista Dee.

It has become a good life.

“Now we’re all doing pretty OK,’’ she said. “Nobody is destitute; everyone has jobs. I’m not saying it was overnight. I had to get myself together. I was still a kid, raising up these kids without a father. It was not easy.’’

Charlie Jr., who is now 30, plays in a band with Debra and teaches steel drums and percussion to Boston public school students at Roland Hayes School of Music, Debra said. Her daughter, Quianna, 28, is an advocate for homeless battered women. And Tiara, a baby at the time of the crime, also plays steel drums and is an artist, Debra said.

Debra has reconnected with some members of the old band, though not Ed Toomer, who was there that night at Tasty Chicken. Toomer moved away and died a few years ago of cancer, she said. Debra got upset once and “really let loose’’ on Toomer, saying he could have done more for Charlie that night. She felt bad about it later. “I did apologize to him, but once I found out he passed away I was upset that we lost touch.’’ It is another piece of the “fallout,’’ she said, from the event that reordered their lives.

Not done suffering

Villaroel, who initiated the attack, is incarcerated at MCI-Shirley. In an exchange of letters with the Globe, he wanted assurances that anything he said would be quoted in context, but then did not write back. He is about 46.

Johnson, now 49, changed his name to Nuri Muhammad, according to the Department of Correction. He is in the Old Colony Correctional Center. He did not respond to a letter from the Globe.

Barros is in MCI-Shirley. In an exchange of letters, he wrote this: “18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 and 42 — these are all the birthdays I’ve spent in prison. This is how this case has changed my life, that the majority of my time here on earth has been here in prison.’’ His family, he said, has “broken’’ under this “painful heavy burden.’’

Witnesses named Barros as a participant in the attack, but he maintains he had nothing to do with it. “My hands are clean,’’ he said. “Yes, I hung out with the wrong people and for that the media painted me as being capable of this.’’

Semedo came to the United States from Cape Verde at age 6 with his mother and three siblings. He completed the eighth grade and then gradually fell into truancy and drug use before the murder. He said his relatives were ashamed of his role in the crime, and his relationship with them was difficult for years. Through the grace of God, he said, the family has reconciled.

“Today I know my mother is proud of the man I have become,’’ he said.

Semedo, who appealed his conviction and lost, petitioned in 2016 to have his sentence commuted to allow for an opportunity for parole. He said he has become a different person. “I grew up without a father and it pains me that I was responsible for taking someone’s father away,’’ he wrote in his petition, which is still pending, though history suggests its chances are slim. Commutations are rare.

Duarte got a second chance in 2013, when a judge resentenced him to allow for the possibility of parole.

He appeared before the Parole Board in April 2014, after 22 years in prison. He admitted punching and kicking Charleston Sarjeant, which he had denied at trial.

“I am here today to say I did participate, and I do take responsibility for everything I did to Mr. Sarjeant, and I am truly sorry,’’ Duarte, then 39, told the board, according to video of the hearing.

Within the tedious trappings of bureaucracy, parole hearings are raw, emotional clashes, unavoidably pitting anguished families against each other.

Duarte’s mother wept and gasped through her testimony, clenching her fist until the tendons bulged in her arm. She was sorry for what Sarjeant’s family endured, a translator relayed, and “she believes she has a good son’’ who was ready for release.

Debra, in turn, told the Parole Board that Duarte should stay locked up. She talked about her children, robbed of their dad. “When they go visit him on Father’s Day, they’re visiting a grave.’’

The Parole Board ruled in November 2014 that Duarte was rehabilitated. He was freed. Debra didn’t like it. Her family was not done suffering, but one of the men responsible was done paying?

Duarte, 42, said through a friend that he did not want to participate in this story. The friend said Duarte wants to look ahead toward the life in front of him. Not back at the inescapable past.

Mark Arsenault can be reached at mark.arsenault@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @bostonglobemark.