LAWRENCE -- People in this tight-knit neighborhood knew these boys. Maybe they knew their mothers, or cousins, or brothers, or maybe they simply told the boys to slow down when they ran to Hanson's Market for candy. Now they are trading memories, trying to make sense of a loss beyond reason.

On Saturday afternoon it was rainy and cold, so Jessica L. Papatola, 15, decided to call her older sister and go to a restaurant. She walked over to the corner store to use the pay phone. The boys ran past her, one leading the pack. She watched the last boy disappear around a corner, running fast to keep up.

Then she went inside Hanson's Market to chat with the clerk. When she left the store, Papatola wondered why there was a firetruck outside. It wasn't long before the scream of sirens filled the air and she knew something was wrong.

Across the street at Riverview Laundromat, Francisca Munoz saw a firetruck and stepped outside. A woman told her some boys fell though the ice. She thought of her 12-year-old nephew.

After a few terrifying minutes, Munoz found him watching a basketball game at the Boys and Girls Club. She brought him back to her Laundromat, leaving his sweater and bag at the club. Then she ran toward the Merrimack River.

The emergency workers were taking children out of the icy water. She watched them pull out the lifeless body of 9-year-old Victor Baez. Children from the Boys and Girls Club sometimes watch television at her shop while they wait for their parents to pick them up. She could not tell if Victor was a child she knew. It hardly mattered. He was a child. She thought of her four children and two grandchildren.

She could not stop crying.

Donna M. Hicks, a neighborhood mother, was standing on the riverbank watching the rescue efforts. The workers also pulled out the lifeless bodies of Christopher Casado, 7; Mackendy Constant, 8; and William Rodriguez, 11. Hicks' daughter went to grade school with three of the boys. She stood in the rain for two hours, wishing for a miracle.

Then she went home. She put on dry clothes, and returned to the riverbank with two pots of hot coffee.

She was among the neighbors who did not leave the river's edge until evening, when the rescue efforts slowly ended.

People in the community who witnessed the rescue did not sleep well that night. Munoz said the image of Victor being dragged from the water kept replaying in her mind. Another neighbor said she needed medication to sleep that night, which she never had needed before.

On Sunday morning, people had more questions than answers. Everyone who came to the Laundromat asked Munoz if she knew the children. People wondered aloud why the children were not at the Boys and Girls Club, and why such a tragedy had to strike their neighborhood. Alone on a curb in the Hancock Projects behind Guilmette School, 15-year-old Nathien Alicea sat crying in the rain after losing a relative and several friends to the icy Merrimack River.

He wanted to be around other people, clinging to groups of children who sat on porches in Water Street neighborhoods talking about the good times they had with the four boys who died Saturday.

"It's painful," Alicea said. "It's a tight community. We're just reminiscing about what happened."

Fanny Romero, Nathan's mother and cousin to the youngest drowning victim -- 7-year-old Christopher Casado -- was helping children in the neighborhood cope with the tragedy. She told the children to pray for the families.

"I tell them (the boys) died as little heroes," Romero said, explaining the conversations she's had with the struggling neighborhood youth. "I tell them they are little soldiers in heaven now, that God wanted them there."

Over at the Guilmette School, Geraldo Gonzales, 13, was bouncing a ball against a wall behind the new elementary school. He said he had been doing backflips on a mattress with two of the boys on Friday afternoon in the Hancock Projects. He had been up until 4 a.m. crying with his two brothers and sister, while his mother, Isabell Reyes, comforted them.

"Everybody is going to cry for these boys," he said. "It's sad because I won't see them again."

Reyes' eyes welled up with tears as she watched her son play.

"It's a big, sad tragedy," Reyes said. "Because I'm a mother, it makes me sad."

Alex Diaz, 10, a fourth-grader at Guilmette, was spending time alone outside the school yesterday afternoon. Alex hopes the school gives students time to draw cards this week to give to the mourning families.

"It's hard for me to believe," he said of losing his friends. "I hope we do something for the boys. It's gonna be sad for a lot of people at school."

At nighfall, Lilly M. Beauregard lit four red candles. She said a prayer, "God bless them all. We will miss them." Then Lilly, 12, set the candles neatly at the top of a steep bank about 20 feet from where the boys plunged into the river off Caulkins Court, a small dirt road leading to the river off Water Street.

The candle glow created a circle of light around the white roses and handmade cards left for the boys. She looked down at the small Christmas tree and angels, along with a piece of paper wedged between the candles that read "I will miss you Christopher."

Beauregard was at a birthday party at her aunt's house when she heard about the drowning. She knew three of the boys from school. She remembers how "little Victor" liked to make people laugh. He barked at her dog. Another of the boys, Mackendy, delivered newspapers to the house across the street.

She pointed to a cross by the water's edge, jutting out of dirt on the steep incline. She said her family left the cross there with the names of each boy on it. Then she hurried along the edge of the bank and into the distance.

Papatola was sitting on rock looking out at water. It looked serene and clear. The entire atmosphere was filled with warmth and light and prayer. Papatola said to no one in particular, "You know how boys are. They're daredevils."

She looked at a small yellow headband set on top of the flowers. She pressed it into her hand. It had an image of a basketball player on it, and people think it belonged to one of the boys.

"They were just going outside to play," she said.