Bleacher Report, which continues to evolve, enlisted Jeff Pearlman to write about the one-year anniversary Jovan Belcher’s suicide in Kansas City.

“Jovan was my friend,” says Thomas Jones, the former Chiefs running back. “I loved him, and I wish I could have helped him work through the demons. But what he did was a horrible, horrible act. There’s no getting around that.”

There is, however, getting into that. Or, to be more precise, trying to understand it. The same Belcher who owned eight guns as a Kansas City Chief was, while a student at the University of Maine, an active member of Male Athletes Against Violence, an organization that urged jocks to speak out against abusive acts. He possessed zero firearms then.

“When I heard what Jovan did, I thought, ‘That can’t be right,’” says Sandy Caron, a professor of family relations and human sexuality at Maine, and the anti-violence group’s founder. “They said ‘Jovan Belcher’ on the news and my response was, ‘They said ‘Jermaine, right? Please tell me they said ‘Jermaine.’”

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At his site, Pearlman writes about how he reported the story.

I immediately decided I didn’t want to write the same ol’ piece: Track down the people there at the end and write about the final moments of Jovan Belcher’s life. I also didn’t want to spend much time inside the Chiefs locker room, where programmed, robotic replies (demanded by the programmed, robotic NFL) would surely ensue. No, I wanted to dig into the lives of two people—Jovan Belcher and his girlfriend, Kasanda Perkins. I wanted to find out who they were. Who they really, really were.

The first thing I did was track down numbers of relatives. I left a message on the answering machine belonging to Jovan’s mother. I reached out to his sisters and cousins and uncles and friends via Facebook. I also tracked down a number for Kasandra’s dad, and left a voice message. He was the first one to respond, roughly two days later. I told him I was trying to learn about his daughter, and asked whether he’d grant me an audience were I to fly down to Austin. “Maybe,” he said. “Let me think about it.” I called back two days later, and his phone was out of service.