Just across the street from the Clayground pottery store and right next door to Winsor Tap's Hot Lunches and Liquors, Jeffrey Curley's home was in the midst of a classic Cambridge neighborhood.

Balanced as much by blue- and white-collar workers as by ethnic and academic lifestyles, residents yesterday said they always thought of it as the perfect place to raise a family.

So the community was shocked Friday when it learned that 10-year-old Curley-who disappeared Wednesday while washing his grandmother's dog-was allegedly killed by a pair of local men who lived only blocks away.

"This is a good old neighborhood," said Jim Henry, a father of two children who lives down the road from the Curley family. "You shouldn't have to worry about this kind of this kind of thing happening to your kids here."

Although the young boy disappeared Wednesday, many residents were still hoping to find him alive on Friday when word came that one suspect, Salvatore Sicari, 21, surrendered to police and the second, Charles Jaynes, 22, was arrested by police.

On Friday, Sicari, a mechanic who lives near Inman Square, was charged with murder and held without bail. Maynes, an auto detailer from Brockton, Mass., was being held on 75 outstanding warrants and was held on $100,000 cash bail.

The men allegedly are lovers and had pornography of men and boys in their possession when they were arrested.

Allegedly, Jaynes sexually abused Curley before killing the young boy.

Yesterday, as friends and neighbors gathered outside at the Curley family's Hampshire Street home to offer condolences and add flowers to the enormous pile already strewn across a nearby parking-lot, most said they were just trying to help the family get through the tragedy.

"Right now it's all about support, man," said 18-year-old Mike Resendes, a neighborhood resident who is a friend of Curley's older brothers. "We're here to show my boys we're with them."

From Resendes and the pack of local teenagers he was with, to neighborhood politicians and local mothers, the diverse crowd of mourners yesterday at the curbside shrine echoed the same sentiment.

"Right now everyone in the city is trying to give as much support to the family as it can," said City Councillor Anthony D. Galluccio.

The North Cambridge council member added that local schools are also play a major role in the community's crisis management.

"The School Department is trying to do the best possible job it can in trying to deal with the psychological effect of this," he said.

Despite Cambridge's often out-spoken Catholic community, some outside the Curley house yesterday suggested the death penalty as the only adequate punishment for such a brutal murder.

"In a case like this, I think the death penalty is reasonable," Henry said.

And while the death penalty is not legal in Massachusetts, some seemed to hope that would soon be changing.

"This is brutal, man," Resendes said. "We need the death penalty. This is going to change it.