IT’S LATE AFTERNOON, MAY 5, 2014, and Daniel Wolfe walks up a shady street through bright sunshine, the heat still rising as the light falls. There’s hardly anyone around to see him, but still he’s a sight: a big lumbering shadow, six feet four, two forty, with a bad knee and a black backpack, a tall broad man among the low quiet houses. He’s wearing plaid shorts, black-and-green tennis shoes, a dark-color shirt. His backpack contains most of what he’s got left. Discharge papers. Records from V.A. hospitals in two states. Old warrants for his arrest. He’s got a V.A.-issued pamphlet on “Pain and Pain Management” and an appointment card for “Mandatory Suicide Prevention Education,” dated three months ago. He’s got a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a cell phone, and a box cutter.

On Facebook, he goes by the name Cerberus Rey Wolfe, after the three-headed hellhound to which Marines send fresh souls. The first photo that appears on his feed is of two half-empty liquor bottles. No one thinks much of it. No one really responds.

Byeee bitches, Daniel had written.

The next photo shows a palm and a leg with cuts all over them. Some of the wounds seem tentative—scratches, really. Others are not so tentative.

The room he's in seems like it could be anywhere. The floor is cheap light-colored wood. The walls are a yellowish white. There's what looks like a bedspread visible—floral, thin, drenched in blood.

The caption reads, Is it real yet fuckers.

His mother and stepfather are at home. Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, over on the east side of town past the payday loan spots and the Chili's, strip malls unspooling as you head toward the outer edge. They're in bed, not that long after the sun sets, when the phone rings. Kris Norman is a friend of Daniel's out in California—a Marine, like Daniel used to be. He asks if Mike and Teresa have seen Daniel recently.

They haven't. To be honest, they're not sure where he is, whether Daniel's here in Broken Arrow or if he's in another state entirely. Over the past two years he's come and gone so much it's hard to say.

“Well, he's posting on Facebook that he's gonna hurt himself,” Kris says.

Maybe three or four years ago, when Daniel was still married and living out in California with his wife and child, this would've been alarming. But the truth is, so much has happened since then that, after they hang up, Mike and Teresa don't even bother going online to open Facebook. They've grown so used to worrying about Daniel that they don't know how to worry more.

So they're asleep when the doorbell rings. Wagoner County sheriff's deputy Nick Mahoney, slight, still young, shifting from leg to leg out on their porch. Deputy Mahoney says they've been getting calls from some of Daniel's friends and fellow vets about these Facebook posts. Teresa, who is kind and tired, tells Deputy Mahoney what she told Kris, what she's had to get used to telling the steady procession of law enforcement stopping by on nights like this one: Daniel hasn't been in good shape these past couple of years. He came back from Iraq with PTSD and a traumatic brain injury. He's prone to depression, especially now that he can't see his daughter. He can behave dramatically sometimes.

“But I don't think that he would intentionally hurt himself,” she says.

Teresa has been using Facebook to keep an eye on Daniel now that they don't really speak. She hasn't had the will to look at it today yet, but she tells Deputy Mahoney to come in; they'll call up Daniel's profile and look together.