“It’s shocking, really shocking, especially since I knew the kid. Just seeing how sad the family is, it’s really kind of heartbreaking,” she said.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Hawn said she was scared by the realization she or her family could have been targeted. While she described the neighborhood as safe, she also commented it “didn’t used to be like this.”

Another neighbor, Manoah Johnson, said he’d noticed an uptick in crime in the neighborhood from the nearby apartment complexes.

Johnson’s friend saw a suspect in the shooting walking through Johnson’s front yard minutes before the attack. It was the same man they’d seen cross over a grassy area from an apartment complex west of the neighborhood multiple times, including Saturday night when Johnson watched him pace back and forth at a stop sign for several minutes.

Still, Walker said, homicides can and do happen everywhere in the city.

“Criminals are a little bit desperate, and so wherever a burglary can happen, you can have this. Wherever a robbery can happen, you can have this,” he said. “We’re just one trigger squeeze away from an awful lot of murders going on. The area of town doesn’t really matter.”