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GREENSBORO — This was Hidden Forest, a north Greensboro neighborhood, on Saturday afternoon: A man sat on a front porch enjoying his granddaughter’s first birthday. Two girls in pigtails rode scooters on the sidewalk. A neighbor washed his truck.

Then came the gunfire: two, maybe three shots. A young man with a black handgun sprinted between houses. Another lay in a nearby front yard, clutching his chest.

An up-and-coming neighborhood is forever changed.

“You hear about people getting shot and dying, but those are just words, pictures on the TV,” said Nicole Patterson, whose family lives on Hidden Forest

Drive across the street from where 20-year-old Matthew Lamarkus Brown died Saturday. “Now, it’s our neighborhood on TV.”

Crimes can be counted and catalogued. They have names — assault, murder, rape, robbery. Fear of crime is harder to pin down. But it finds its way into every neighborhood. Even Monday’s arrest in Reidsville of 17-year-old Rashawd Terrell Welch, who police have charged with Brown’s killing, did little to soothe the nerves of some Hidden Forest residents.

Eddie Jeffers doesn’t just lock his front door now, he bolts it. Marilyn Shelton’s Monday morning was spent on the phone looking for an alarm system.

And Patterson now thinks twice before letting her children play in the front yard.

“It’s going to take a while for us to get over this,” Shelton said.

Hidden Forest is a modest subdivision of new homes off Summit Avenue in north Greensboro. It’s a diverse neighborhood of white, black and Hispanic families. For many, these two-story homes are their first.

Until Saturday, the worst crime in Hidden Forest was a broken window or two. “Typical teenager stuff,” said Jeffers, who along with his wife, Kourtney, was one of the first families to move into Hidden Forest three years ago.

The Jefferses had just finished celebrating the first birthday of their daughter Celeste when the shooting happened. The presents and torn wrapping paper were on the dining room table.

Eddie Jeffers was passing out leftover strawberry cake to neighborhood children while his father-in-law waited on the front porch.

When the shots rang out, Eddie Jeffers, a Kernersville firefighter, and his father-in-law raced across the street to find Brown crumpled in the grass. “There was a lot of blood,” Jeffers said. “He was already circling the drain.”

Patterson said her children, Jordan, 3, Jasmine, 6, and Jonathan, 10, frequently play in the family’s front yard. The shooting happened about 5 p.m. Saturday when the family was away. “If we’d have been home, the girls probably would have been out there playing,” she said.

Police said the shooting, which took place at the home of Welch’s parents, was related to money. Neighbors said drugs were being sold out of the house.

Welch has been charged with first-degree murder and is being held in the Guilford County jail. The family’s house was dark Monday night and nobody answered the front door.

Neighbors were relieved to learn of Welch’s arrest, but that only goes so far.

Shelton and Patterson worry about someone seeking retribution for the killing. “I just hope and pray it’s over with,” Shelton said.

Jeffers said he wasn’t shaken by the shooting; he came to Greensboro from New York. “This happens all the time in New York so I’m used to it. That doesn’t mean I’m accepting it. There are a lot of people here who I promise you are going to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Then, he closed his front door and locked it. First the doorknob. Then the deadbolt.

Contact Robert Bell at 373-7055 or robert.bell@news-record.com