MINNEAPOLIS -- Timothy Moore pauses the conversation, in the middle of telling a reporter about the events that put him in prison for 18 1/2 years. The phone at his halfway house will cut off after 15 minutes, but Moore has a question to ask.

"How is Captain doing this year? Is he playing good ball?"

Moore is relieved to hear his younger brother, cornerback Captain Munnerlyn, is enjoying a productive second season with the Minnesota Vikings, excelling as a nickel corner for a playoff contender. But he won't need to rely on secondhand accounts much longer. Soon, the older brother will get to behold in person the NFL career the younger brother believes wouldn't have happened had tragedy not jolted his family awake. Soon, the younger brother will get to share in the day that became a driving force for Moore to get out of prison.

This Thanksgiving will be Moore's first outside prison walls since he was convicted of murder in 1996 for shooting a 15-year-old boy while trying to hit a man who had allegedly robbed him in Mobile, Alabama. He spent more than 19 years in prison in Atmore, Alabama, before he was paroled this past June. Moore had his first weekend out in the free world at the end of October. He wasn't granted another 48-hour pass to travel to Atlanta last Sunday, where Munnerlyn had his first interception of the season, but he'll get another 48-hour pass next weekend, when Munnerlyn plans to visit after the Vikings' game in Arizona next Thursday. Moore will be out of transitional housing on Feb. 11. He and Munnerlyn talk almost daily about what it will be like when Moore is in the stands to watch him sometime during the 2016 season. That day will be a sweet payoff to a journey that saw lives changed because of a horrible event.

Shortly before the murder, Munnerlyn's mother Evelyn had become a Christian at a funeral; she told Timothy to turn himself in and bear the burden for the crime so his younger brother Gregory -- who was 15 at the time and was with Timothy that night -- would be spared a harsher punishment. Evelyn Munnerlyn knew she had to get Captain out of Mobile's drug-ravaged Happy Hill neighborhood. She vowed the streets wouldn't get her youngest boy, her miracle baby, the one who had been born three months premature, saved from a shooting when he was four and lost his father to a shooting when he was six.

Today, Evelyn Munnerlyn works at Mount Hebron Church Ministries in Mobile. Gregory Moore eventually spent a year in prison on a robbery charge; he's 36 and is doing prison ministry in Mobile. Timothy will return home in February to live with his mother and work at Grand Glass Windows and Doors, building mahogany doors with his best friend Lewis Snipes, who has known Moore since they were 5 or 6. And Captain Munnerlyn -- now in his seventh NFL season -- doesn't believe he would be here if not for the shooting that led his mother to change her life.

"It changed the whole family," Munnerlyn said. "Most little brothers try to follow their big brother's lead. My brother sold drugs, and did things like that. I'm not happy that somebody lost their life. You never want to see someone lose their loved ones. But it changed my family's life. It helped me get to the situation I'm in now, playing on Sundays."

Trouble nearby in Happy Hill

Growing up in Happy Hill, danger often lurked close at hand for Munnerlyn. His parents were never married, and his father, Larry Crear, had left the family several years before a cousin killed him in a bar after an argument about a woman. Crime and drugs pervaded the streets; Munnerlyn remembered one Fourth of July when his mother demanded he come home with her, despite his protests that he wanted to stay at his grandmother's house. Later that night, the house was hit with crude bombs.

"Everybody ended up surviving, but my grandmama had to jump from the third level of the house all the way down -- like stuff you see in the movies," Munnerlyn said. "I was supposed to have been in that house, and it got burned down. I lost all my childhood trophies. My brother lost his pictures. All my baby pictures were burned up in the house."

Munnerlyn was 7 at the time of his brother's arrest, but remembered sensing beforehand that his two older brothers were getting into trouble. "We were all headed down a bad path," Snipes said. "We hung out late at night. We sold drugs. We did things that normal kids our age didn’t do."

The night of the shooting, Munnerlyn recalled, his brothers parked their car in front of his mother's house. Soon after, a police car pulled up, and Munnerlyn raced to his sister. "I was like, 'Muffin' -- we call my sister 'Muffin' -- 'the police is outside,'" Munnerlyn said. "She was like, 'What? I'm telling Mom.' My mom called my brothers, and talked to them about the situation, and my mom said they had to do the right thing. The police picked both of my brothers up, they went through the murder trial, my mom found Christianity, and it changed our whole life."

Moore tried to argue in court the shooting was out of self-defense, since the man he was targeting had previously robbed him. But he was convicted in March 1996, and Munnerlyn grew up without an older brother he had regarded as a father figure. The conviction, though, only served to accelerate the changes his mother had already begun to make.

"We moved a little before my sons got in trouble, but I wasn’t saved. I didn’t have a desire to be saved," Evelyn Munnerlyn said. "I didn’t think that I needed to be changed. When you’re living in the world, you don’t know you need to change. I felt like my life was OK; didn’t think that my life was a mess. I began to see the goodness of God, and that did it for me.

"I began to look at my life different. I heard the voice of the Lord say, if I would continue to be righteous, he would not withhold anything good from Captain. I wanted better for my kids. I didn’t want them to grow up in that atmosphere forever. I stayed 28 years in a place. There were lot of drugs; it was time to get out."

'I'm glad for second chances'

Munnerlyn grew up in Moore's shadow on the football field and baseball diamond; Moore was taller, and some around Mobile always told Munnerlyn his older brother was the better athlete. But where Moore found trouble, Munnerlyn threw himself into sports.

He was an all-state cornerback in football, a state meet runner-up in the long jump in track and field and earned a scholarship to South Carolina. As he grew up, Munnerlyn stayed as close to Moore as he could, talking with him so often over the phone in college that Moore got to know Munnerlyn's roommate, current New York Giants (and former Vikings) linebacker Jasper Brinkley. When the Carolina Panthers picked the 5-foot-9 cornerback in the seventh round of the 2009 NFL draft, Moore was on the phone with him.

"It means a lot. I don’t take it lightly," Moore said. "When I get a chance to talk to guys, I tell them about my family being a good support. It's good to have folks holding you accountable. It really helped me to have them in my life."

The point at which Captain and Evelyn Munnerlyn had to dole out the most tough love came in May 2011, when a Mobile County parole board denied Moore's request for a shortened sentence. Munnerlyn, who was about to begin his first year as a full-time starter for the Panthers, traveled to the hearing to vouch for his brother. He was taken aback when he found out Moore wasn't following rules in prison.

"He got caught with cell phones (in prison)," Captain Munnerlyn said. "My mama, she was very upset, because we didn't know. We went there thinking, 'This is your shot to get out.' The whole family, we were pouring our hearts out. But they were like, 'We can't let this guy out, because he's not doing the right things in here.' I don't think my mom talked to him for a month or two. I was upset with him, because I went up there thinking he was doing the right things. He'd been telling us, 'I've been doing everything right.'"

At first, Evelyn Munnerlyn told her son, "I hope you stay in there." The family made a pact not to answer calls from numbers with a 251 area code they didn't recognize, because they might be from a cell phone belonging to Moore.

About that time, Moore started to change his behavior. He cut ties with inmates who had been pushing him to get in trouble, and began following prison rules. Evelyn Munnerlyn began writing Moore letters, telling him that there was still a bigger plan for his life. On June 16, 2015 -- the first day of Vikings minicamp -- Moore called Captain Munnerlyn to let him know he had been granted parole.

Now, for someone who hadn't been in the free world since 1996, the modern world quickly looked like a strange place. Munnerlyn laughed as he recalled Moore's amazement with FaceTime after he was introduced to video calling technology. Even the 96-mile trip with Snipes, from transitional housing in Thomasville, Alabama, back to Mobile on his first free weekend last month, brought its own twists.

"I've got a funny story for you," Munnerlyn said. "They had to pull over like two or three times. He had to throw up -- motion sickness, from not being in the car that long. It kind of threw him off. I'm like, 'Man, you're throwing up?' He's like, 'Man, all I'm used to is walking and running. I've not been in a car in 19 years!'"

The rest of Moore's first weekend away from the halfway house was much smoother. Snipes took him shopping for clothes, Evelyn Munnerlyn welcomed about 100 people to her house for a cookout and Moore got to see Munnerlyn's four-year-old son, Captain Jr., play running back in a pee-wee football game. They finished the weekend at Mount Hebron, with Moore giving a 15-minute testimony to the congregation.

"He was so excited," Snipes said. "It was a great experience for both of us. We had a big gathering for him, a successful gathering of people from our church. It was a great gathering of family and friends."

When Moore gets his next pass next weekend, Snipes will take him to visit his brother Gregory in Birmingham, Alabama, and Munnerlyn will head south as soon as Vikings coach Mike Zimmer lets the team leave for the weekend. And on Feb. 11, Moore will be home for good.

He is taking classes in a trade school, and is counting down the days until his next free weekend, until he leaves the halfway house, crossing them off one-by-one on a calendar.

"I took a life," he said. "Every day, I think about it. I can’t bring it back; I can only ask for forgiveness. I've learned about being around people who want something in life, being a productive citizen, coming in the house, doing the right things. It takes hard work to rebuild my life, and not everybody’s going to sell me trust. It's not given; it’s earned."

If life in the free world brings its own snares, as Moore tries to hold an honest job for the first time as a 40-year-old man, he'll only have nine more months of waiting until he can sit in a NFL stadium and see his younger brother smiling up at him.

"I'm just happy that my brother gets to see the streets again. I didn't think he'd ever see it again," Munnerlyn said. "I'm glad for second chances."