Joey Meek, left, watches as his brother Jacob plays a video game while Lindsey Fry does dishes. One or more of the Meek brothers and their friends are playing the Xbox almost constantly.

Before the trailer, the Meek brothers lived in another part of Lexington, in a house in a subdivision called Ridgewood. A family photo from those days shows them smiling in front of a brick fireplace, the boys in button-downs and polos.

Roof had lived on an adjacent street, and Shane lived nearby. Shane boxed with Justin, taught Jacob survival skills and was closest in age and friendship to Joey. When he was a teenager, Shane made YouTube videos with titles such as “Shane on Ambien,” in which he stumbles through a disheveled house while several younger kids laugh at him, push him around and swat him with a drumstick. Shane often stayed with the Meeks, who liked having him around. “Hi, Mom,” he would say to Kim when he came through the door, making her laugh.

He would stay for weeks at the house in Ridgewood, and when Kim lost the house to foreclosure, he would stay at the trailer, even though he had his own trailer by then. He was around when Roof arrived in May, but the two didn’t interact very much. Mostly, Shane drank and played video games. He was 21 at that point and saying troubling things that none of the Meeks took seriously. One day it was about his sorrow over not seeing his newborn son, who was living with his estranged girlfriend in another state. One day it had to do with being evicted. One night he messaged Justin saying that he was going to drink a bottle of bug poison, and Justin didn’t believe him and went back to playing Xbox.

Kim was the first to find out. She called Joey to say that Shane had put a shotgun in his mouth and killed himself. Joey remembers getting teary, and he also remembers not believing it and asking Roof to drive him over to Shane’s trailer.

Lindsey and Roof stayed in the car, and Lindsey remembers Roof not saying a word or expressing any kind of emotion. Joey and Justin, meanwhile, walked up to Shane’s door, half-expecting to see Shane waiting for them, laughing that they fell for his joke. But then they were inside, seeing Shane’s blood all over the couch, and Joey was getting sick.

“Anyways, when I was in there I had grabbed his boots — they’re right over there,” Joey says now, pointing to a pair of worn cowboy boots he took from the trailer that night as a memento. The boots are mixed into a pile of shoes in the bedroom where sometimes Shane slept, and sometimes Roof slept, and where Justin now drops onto a twin mattress on the floor and closes his eyes.