Constance Dingle stood outside her house less than 48 hours after Sean Taylor's death -- a ringing cordless phone in one hand, a beeping cellphone in the other -- receiving condolences and fretting about funeral arrangements for her murdered grandson.

''He was a good kid. My grandson opened doors for women, he respected people, he was polite,'' she said, struggling to be heard above the exuberant giggles of neighborhood children at play in her yard. ``He was smart, too.''

This was the somber, exhausted, hollow voice of a grandmother who helped raise Taylor, the Washington Redskins' All-Pro safety who had spent part of his childhood at her son's house next door.

Dingle had potty-trained Sean over a weekend. She had sung his favorite Itsy Bitsy Spider over and over and had taught him to read by sounding out the letters of street signs around Richmond Heights, a middle-class community of winding streets and pastel houses. Dingle, her son Pedro and Sean had lived on a street -- a Place, really -- with just four houses and within skipping distance of a park.

Dingle's recounting of her memories of Taylor are interrupted by a steady caravan of reporters and camera crews all here to dig out the story of the star athlete who died violently in his bedroom in an upscale neighborhood a few miles away from his boyhood home.

He was the victim of a random, botched burglary, police say.

On Friday, Miami-Dade police arrested three teenagers and a 20-year-old, saying they shot Taylor, 24, during an armed break-in at his $900,000 home on Old Cutler Road in Palmetto Bay. Police said the intruders thought he wouldn't be home. They fired after he came at them with a machete. Attorneys for two suspects said Saturday that their clients have confessed.

The arrests put an end to the questions about whether Taylor's modest brushes with the law -- including a 2001 fistfight at Florida International University (no charge), a 2004 DUI charge in Virginia (later dropped) and a 2005 confrontation involving guns (pleaded out to a misdemeanor) -- could offer some insight into why he was shot.

Dingle said it has been difficult to watch strangers dissect her grandson's charmed, if complicated, life.

''You know, they keep saying that Sean changed his life after having a baby,'' she said. ``Sean was already living right. He has moved forward since the day he was born.''

Just last week, Dingle cooked Sean's favorite dessert: sweet-potato pie. She never got a chance to give it to him.

``By knowing the Lord and having great faith, I don't ask why, because God does not make mistakes. Maybe He plucked Sean now to help save someone else.''

• 

A few months after his birth on April Fool's Day in 1983, Sean Michael Maurice was introduced to the Bethel Seventh-day Adventist Church in Florida City.

He became a fixture there, going to services with his dad, stepmother and grandmother.

''Sean went to church every Saturday unless he had practice,'' his great-aunt, Merlane Williams, said from her home in Richmond Heights.

He got his first taste of football as a 60-pound 6-year-old on the Homestead Hurricanes. Taylor went on to play for the Florida City Razorbacks, a team that his dad helped coach.

Glenn ''Lucky'' Smith remembers running footraces with Taylor outside Pine Lake Elementary when they were boys. Smith, who now works for a cable company, said the neighborhood kids, even at 8, 9 and 10, expected Taylor to be great.

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