He had been a student at the school, according to university officials.

A day after Pedro Rodriguez’s death, his friends say they are searching for answers as to what led the 25-year-old Lawrence man to apparently drive into the Boston Harbor behind the University of Massachusetts, where his body was discovered Saturday.

They can’t seem to make sense of it.

“We’re trying to understand why he would do this,” said McDanner Pereyra, 24, a childhood friend from Lawrence. “No one understands this.”

Law enforcement and school officials have not identified the man. His family declined to comment Sunday, but several of his friends identified him as the man whose body was found on Saturday.


The details surrounding his death were unclear Sunday.

“The circumstances of his death remain under investigation,” said Jake Wark, spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney’s office. “The death is not considered suspicious and is being investigated as a nonhomicide.”

Rodriguez had a school-age son whom he adored, friends said. “He brought his son everywhere,” said longtime friend Juan Duran, 26. “He wanted his son to look up to him.”

Duran said Rodriguez was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Lawrence. His father was not present in his life, he said.

He was passionate about making music and cultivating talent in Lawrence.

“If we made music it had to be perfect,” said Pereyra, an aspiring rapper and one of Rodriguez’s artists. “It couldn’t be ‘all right.’ He was so versatile. He could make you any type of beat.”

Rodriguez was a fan of popular hip-hop duo Mobb Deep and of the late record producer and rapper J Dilla. He spent hours in the studio from the evening into the early morning, his friends said.

“[Music] was something naturally [he] just had,” Duran said.

But his friends say music took a back seat after his mother died about a year ago. He also had to care for an elderly uncle and a younger brother, in addition to his son.


“I knew he was going through a lot of stuff inside,” Pereyra said. “He wouldn’t talk to nobody about it.”

His friends say they continued to encourage him to return to his music.

“I used to tell him, ‘come on, you’ve got to do this,’ ” Pereyra said.

But on Saturday Rodriguez posted a video to his Twitter account that showed him driving into the water. Another Tweet included a photo of a cracked windshield.

At 9:47 a.m., about three minutes after he apparently drove toward the edge of the water, he wrote his final tweet: “For the most high I lived.”

Rodriguez had been a UMass student who enrolled in 2009 and then again in spring 2014, but never graduated, according to UMass spokesman DeWayne Lehman. He was an undeclared science major, Lehman said.

In an e-mail blast to the Boston campus Sunday afternoon, UMass officials said “a tragic incident on campus claimed the life of a young man.”

“Our thoughts are with those affected by and who responded to this unfortunate event,” officials said in the e-mail. Counseling services were available, according to the e-mail.

UMass officials were notified at around noon Saturday when a jogger spotted the vehicle in the water, officials said. State and Boston police departments, Boston Fire, UMass Police, and Boston Emergency Medical Services responded to the scene.


A Boston firefighter and an emergency responder reached the 2014 Toyota Prius with a Massachusetts registration and determined that it contained a lone male occupant who was deceased, State Police spokesman David Procopio said Sunday.

A preliminary investigation found that the driver drove off the road, through a chain-link fence near University Hall, up a grassy slope, over the embankment and the HarborWalk, past two granite posts, down a rocky ledge, and into the water, according to Procopio and UMass officials.

The Lawrence man’s body was removed from the vehicle at about 2:15 p.m., Procopio said.

An autopsy to determine a cause of death is pending, he said.

Jan Ransom can be reached at jan.ransom@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jan_Ransom.