New York ? Thirteen years after his younger brother went to jail for the murder of a friend, Lorenzo Branch took the witness stand in a tense Brooklyn courtroom Friday and said the friend was actually killed in a struggle with him.

“It’s eating me up inside,” Lorenzo Branch, 41, testified as his 38-year-old imprisoned brother, Lamont, sat staring at him with piercing eyes from the defense table. “My brother’s in jail for something he didn’t do.”

Back in 1988, Lorenzo said he had gotten into a dispute over an apartment he shared with family friend Danny Josephs. He said the 37-year-old man wanted to sell drugs there and he asked him to leave. Lorenzo, who had another home with a girlfriend, said he left for a couple of weeks but came back alone on March 26, 1988, and knocked on the door.

“He opened the door casually like everything was cool, like he wasn’t mad or nothing,” Lorenzo testified, wearing a suit and tie in court, as his brother, clad in a track suit, alternated between eyeing him suspiciously and dabbing his eyes.

The brothers, who resemble each other, both have braided dreadlocks tied together halfway down their backs.

“I walked in four feet and I told Danny … he still got to go and before I know it, he was pulling a gun from his waist … I reached and pushed his hands up … a shot ran off” and Josephs fell.

“I seen him kicking while he was on the floor,” a teary-eyed Lorenzo testified, apparently referring to a spasm Josephs suffered after he was shot. “I didn’t know what to do. I just ran. I turned and ran.”

The testimony  given in an emotion-packed, standing-room-only courtroom, with the men’s sisters, parents and another brother looking on  was an effort to gain freedom for Lamont, who was convicted of second-degree murder in the killing in 1990 and sentenced to 25 years to life behind bars.

It was not the first time Lorenzo had come forward. In 1994, Lorenzo, accompanied by his mother, made a videotaped statement saying that he and not Lamont was the shooter.

But in 1997, when a hearing was held, Lorenzo invoked the Fifth Amendment and State Supreme Court Justice James Starkey refused a motion for a new trial, despite a “gnawing sense” that Lamont might be innocent.

Starkey granted Friday’s hearing after a new defense motion to overturn the conviction.