With shock and grief clutching Borough Park in Brooklyn, thousands of mourners and residents poured into a neighborhood courtyard Wednesday evening for the funeral of an 8-year-old Brooklyn boy who was abducted and killed this week as he walked home from camp.

The funeral for the boy swelled to capacity before its scheduled start time at 8:30, prompting many of the thousands who could not get in to gather behind police barricades, crowding neighborhood streets as they waited to pay their respects to the young boy, Leiby Kletzky, whose remains were discovered earlier in the day. Throngs of police officers and members of a local security patrol group, the shomrim, kept order as a steady stream of visitors poured into the courtyard, adjacent to a school between 16th and 17th Avenues, within two blocks of where the boy lived. One of the shomrim volunteers estimated close to 8,000 people were in attendance.