William L. Aronson ’04, who lived next door to Fonseca, said he was always thoughtful about friends.

“If I was up late at night, he would get stuff from Brain Break and leave it for me, like he would make a sandwich and leave it on my desk,” Aronson said.

Winthrop Senior Tutor James von der Heydt added that he often saw Fonseca socializing around the House and the dining hall.

“I was impressed with him because he had so many different kinds of friends—he was so plugged in,” von der Heydt said.

Fonseca’s apparent suicide comes about one year after the suicide of Marian H. Smith, class of 2004. Smith, also a Winthrop resident, took her own life in December 2002.

“I don’t think there’s any way of putting things on a scale in terms of comparing what’s hard and less hard,” von der Heydt said, after being asked whether it was more difficult for the House to handle this death a year after that of Smith. “It’s something we’ve been through, and it doesn’t get any easier, but we are taking care of each other.”

Von der Heydt said the House would host a memorial, but that the details and timing are still being planned.

“The main thing to do as a House in the aggregate is to get people together,” von der Heydt said. “That’s a big part of it, is that everyone looks out for each other in times like this.”

Fonseca was widely known as “Deuce,” a nickname Aronson said he thought Fonseca picked up from a team he played on when he was younger.

“We joked he had given himself a nickname,” Aronson said. “It was because he was on a sports team with his two brothers, and he was the middle one.”

Fonseca was passionate about filmmaking, and Thomas D. Odell ’04-’05, who lived in Winthrop J-entryway with Fonseca, remembered having lunch with him in Los Angeles over intersession. Fonseca was at the Harvardwood program, in which Harvard students travel to Hollywood to meet alums in the film industry.

“He had clearly fallen in love with the city,” Odell wrote in an e-mail. “He told me some great stories about the trip and about his impressions of L.A., all with his typical perceptiveness and good humor.”

Odell wrote that Fonseca “couldn’t wait to live there after college.”

Randy D. Xu ’04 said that when he ran into Fonseca and a friend in Los Angeles, they were “raving about the stars they got to meet.”

“Brad Pitt came up, and they got to tour quite a few studios,” Xu said.