BOSTON (AP) – Will Dunn’s life has been a strange twisting ride: from baby born with heroin in his veins, to gangbanger implicated in the slaughter of two children, to escaped prisoner, to reformed family man, and now to honored guest of the president and symbol of hope for the nation.

But in this city, Dunn has long symbolized something else: the cruel barbarity of gang warfare.

To the families of the two murdered boys, who were ages 11 and 15 when gunned down almost 14 years ago, Dunn’s recognition by the White House chafes against old scars. Their children were just bystanders, hanging out on a stoop near home, when they collapsed in a wild spray of bullets loosed unaccountably by one of Dunn’s gang brothers. Dunn and another gang member flanked the gunman that night. All three slipped away in the chaos afterward. Dunn, then 16, went out for pizza.

“How can you honor someone like that?” asks Patricia Copney, mother of the murdered 11-year-old, Charles.

Yet there was Dunn earlier this month, beaming in a natty double-breasted suit, accented by a red handkerchief, during President Bush’s State of the Union address. He sat in first lady Laura Bush’s box for guests of honor, right next to a decorated Marine.

At age 30, Dunn mentors potentially trouble-bound kids, along with tending to office duties, at a youth center in Boston’s ragged Dorchester neighborhood. He was invited to the president’s speech to put a human face on a $150 million White House proposal to help community groups – especially ones with a religious bent -that seek to “provide a positive model for youth.”

His public resurrection raises perplexing questions. Should the world rejoice or recoil at the sight of Will Dunn a few seats from the first lady? Is he the same Will Dunn that this city once reviled, or is he someone else? Can young criminals nursed in a moral vacuum grow a conscience?

Willie Lee Dunn was practically born for grief. His mother was a heroin addict; his father, an ex-convict. His strict grandmother tried to raise him and teach him values of right and wrong, but she died of a heart attack when he was only 7.

“No discipline,” says Dunn, thinking back on childhood. “I could do whatever I wanted to do.”

Now a soft-voiced, bearded, bearlike man in loose-fitting gym clothes, Dunn laid out his own story for the first time in a recent Associated Press interview at the Ella J. Baker House, the youth center where he now works. A window overlooked grimy houses, the luminous sea beyond and an island where Dunn once fled from state juvenile custody.

Dunn used to live in a housing project in the nearby Roxbury district, where he began to drink and smoke dope. Though smart, he dropped out of ninth grade. With no teacher or relative on close watch, he turned to gangs for belonging, self-worth and protection. He adopted the ethos of the street: Take what you want.

“I can remember from 8, 9, 10 years old, my intentions were never good: Let’s stab this kid. We can take this from him,” Dunn says.

In the year leading up to the murders, he was often in and out of court. The charges started with car theft and progressed to armed assault, according to court records.

On April 20, 1991, he was prowling the streets with two gang comrades, hunting for members of a rival gang. As Dunn’s former prosecutor Walter Shea tells it, they were bent on revenge. Dunn says they meant only to gauge the status of their feud.

Shea says Dunn admitted providing a .22-caliber pistol to gang member Damien Bynoe; today Dunn says the gun came from someone else and denies ever telling authorities otherwise. Still, he admits he knew of the gun hidden on Bynoe and realized things could turn ugly.

Rounding a corner that evening, the three members of the Orchard Park Trailblazers came upon a handful of young people on a stairway in front of an apartment building. Without warning, Bynoe pulled out the gun and started shooting. To this day, no one has explained why.

The two boys, who had nothing to do with gangs, fell to the ground, mortally wounded. The 11-year-old bleated for his mother. Dunn bellowed the gang’s name in a war whoop. Today, he says he doesn’t know why.

The public was already edgy over a rash of gang violence. The young age of these latest victims and the senselessness of their deaths kindled outrage. For Boston, these shootings came to embody much of what was broken in the heart of America’s cities.

The three teenagers were soon arrested. Bynoe confessed to murder in juvenile court and went into custody until age 21, when he was released as required by state law. Charges against the second gang member were eventually dismissed over misuse of evidence.

Viewed as the ringleader, Dunn went to adult court on a murder charge. He was acquitted at trial but convicted of gun possession, with the jury accepting that he exercised joint control over the weapon. He was given a term of up to five years in prison.

“Willie Dunn, in my opinion, got away with murder,” says Shea, now an assistant district attorney in another county.

The killings were so notorious that they eventually gave rise to a state law that heightened potential terms for teenagers accused of murder. It was called the Copney-Grant law, after the two victims. “Even if I’m doing good now, I know the case is always going to stick to me,” says Dunn.

Looking back, he believes he first sensed the glimmer of a better life when he confronted a possible life sentence on the adult murder charge. “I started to get scared that my life was done,” he says.

Later, while he was still serving time, a close friend was fatally shot in the head in a gang attack outside the housing complex where Dunn grew up. Other friends had died in gang violence, but this time Dunn realized it could easily have been him.

He had already begun some Bible studies. He says he started thinking more intensely about right and wrong – what his grandmother wanted to instill in him: “Should I go out and affect someone else’s life … by acting the fool, or should I contribute to someone else being happy?”

Yet Dunn’s turnaround took time. He escaped twice while in custody after the shootings. Even now, though married with three children, he resents his gun sentence as unfair and draconian by contrast with typical terms for the crime.

Dunn left state custody in January 1996 as a free man for the first time in almost five years. The next year, he landed his first regular job as a file clerk at a sympathetic black law firm willing to take a chance on the earnest-seeming young black man. Four years ago, he started work at Baker House, which is overseen by Pentecostal minister and social activist Rev. Eugene Rivers.

Rivers had advised Bush on how to mobilize religious groups. Now, the White House asked him for someone to personify its anti-gang program, according to Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for Mrs. Bush. The minister suggested Dunn.

“The point was to use Mr. Dunn as an example to help kids not fall into a life of crime. Not only has he turned his life around, but he’s helping other people turn their life around,” Johndroe says.

Indeed, says Dunn: “What guy in the hood gets a chance to grow up and meet the president and first lady?”

However, the Boston Herald and talk radio were soon railing over the elevation of someone known for his connection to such an infamous crime. The dead boys’ families fumed.

“That was a slap on the face to every victim on the planet,” says Deborah Hall-Grant, mother of the older victim of the double murder, Korey Grant.

Compounding their sense of insult, just one of the two mothers was informed of Dunn’s honor – and only by a letter delivered the day of the speech, they say. Johndroe says the White House was assured by its local contacts that the victims’ families would not be upset. Rivers did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis detected an irony in the president’s princely treatment of Dunn.

Dukakis was hurt in his failed presidential run against Bush’s father by ads about Willie Horton, a murderer who committed a rape while on prison furlough. Pointing to dozens of executions allowed during the current president’s tenure as Texas governor, Dukakis says, “If he or his wife or whatever are prepared to recognize the fact that people who commit crimes are able to come back and do positive things, then I commend him.”

Melvin Minard, 26, who was mentored by Dunn and now works at Baker House, says the former gang member strikes a special rapport with street kids: “He knows exactly where they’re coming from.”

Clearly, Dunn has come a long way – but perhaps not all the way. He says he’s still tempted by old instincts sometimes when he sees others living in high style. He has stayed friends with his two gang brothers involved in the shooting. And he has never apologized to the dead boys’ families.

“There’s nothing I can say to anybody that would mean anything. All I can do is say, “I’m sorry you lost your son’s life’ – but I didn’t take it,” he says.

Instead of pursuing this reconciliation with his past, he’s trying to build positive support networks for young people today.

He also daydreams about his future – possibly a career in real estate or a startup business that creates urban jobs. Maybe he’ll move his family to the suburbs, send his children to private school.

But he says he’d never move too far from the old neighborhood. After all the changes, it’s still at the center of his world.