A star basketball and baseball player with the trophies to prove it, 11-year-old William Rodriguez never seemed to run out of energy, his father said yesterday.

Nine-year-old Victor Baez was always "happy," often stopping by a neighbor's house to play with her baby niece.

Victor and William were two of the four boys killed yesterday, falling through the ice into the Merrimack River. William had gone out onto the ice first. Victor, 7-year-old Christopher Casado, and 8-year-old Mackendy Constant died trying to save William.

William spent yesterday afternoon doing what he loved best -- competing in a Saturday basketball shootout at the Lawrence Boys and Girls Club with his friends and his 13-year-old brother, Jason.

A popular jokester and good student at Parthum Elementary School, William was the youngest of seven children -- "my baby," said his father, Eufemio Rodriguez.

"I really loved him," said Christopher Rodriguez, the 12-year-old brother of William. "He was a good basketball player. He liked to fool around and make jokes. He liked to run around and jump around."

Christopher watched his father sob as he talked to relatives on the phone.

Following the basketball shootout, Jason looked for his brother, but couldn't find him. He went home alone in a taxi.

It was a police car that next pulled up to the alley leading to the Rodriguez' triple-decker at 292 Howard St. in North Lawrence. William and seven of his friends had fallen through ice on the Merrimack River near Water Street, less than 100 yards from the Boys and Girls Club, the family was told.

"The police said he was OK," said Christopher.

William was later pronounced dead at Holy Family Hospital in Methuen, the first of the four friends to die.

Christopher and his father were the first to arrive home from the hospital last night. Pots of food from dinner remained on the stove and dinner plates rested in the sink. The lights on a silver Christmas tree glistened in their small living room.

William was a good student, bringing home report cards full of As and Bs, his father said.

But his first love was basketball and the Boys and Girls Club was like William's second home, his family said.

"I always went to see my baby play," Eufemio Rodriguez said.

Victor Baez and other neighborhood children would sometimes walk on the iced-over Merrimack River despite the danger, his neighbor Yirkina Santana said.

"It was raining and dark," she said. "I don't know why they went. They used to do it a lot."

Victor lived with his mother, stepfather and younger sister at 46 Bernard St. in the Hancock Courts housing project, Yirkina said.

Yirkina, 17, and her sister Marciel, 11, live in the same building as Victor and he had visited them the night before he died.

"He was playing with our baby niece, and he was happy -- like he always was," Marciel said. "He would come by all the time to watch TV and say hello."

Police came by at about 4:15 p.m. and Victor's mother, Thema Gomez, phoned the Santanas a few minutes later, crying and asking them to watch her daughter while she was out, Yirkina said.

Gomez is originally from the Dominican Republic and sometimes worked as a substitute teacher at the Hennessey School down the street, they said.