Their phones lit up on the last Saturday of May, not quite their worst fear but something close.
Have you heard anything about Johnny? He's gone missing.
Earlier in the day Johnny Manziel had been scheduled to board a helicopter for a Memorial Day outing with his family. But after a long and occasionally chaotic night of partying in New York, he hadn't shown up. He wasn't answering calls or responding to texts, and so his family reached out to anyone who might've heard from him.
Manziel's retired high school football coach started making calls. His former youth minister issued a flood of texts. The high school's receptionist read the Internet stories she'd sworn off, an attempt at preserving her memory of the sweet and thoughtful young man she had once known.
Something like this, they feared, was inevitable: "Johnny Football," whose audacity and air of invincibility at Texas A&M produced a national phenomenon and delivered the Heisman Trophy to small-town Texas, had finally brought Johnny Manziel to the edge of a cliff.
How else to explain it? The Johnny they knew was humble and gregarious, patient and loyal and good with children. The man they read and heard about more recently - whose behavior they tried, so often, to avert their eyes from - looked and seemed unfamiliar.
The gaunt figure standing near the Las Vegas pool in the Instagram post from May? Almost unrecognizable. The tabloid and gossip site mainstay who, according to an affidavit, dragged his ex-girlfriend into a car before allegedly hitting her and threatening to kill himself? Difficult even to fathom. The quarterback whose brief but turbulent career with the Cleveland Browns ended in March and who, two weeks before NFL training camps open, has shown no interest in playing again? A stranger, surely.
The Johnny who in the past five months has been sued, is facing a grand jury indictment, been involved in two car accidents and whose own father has publicly called a "druggie" and questioned whether he will live until December, long enough to reach his 24th birthday?
"That's not the person I know," said Tony Vela, the former youth minister who has known Manziel for years and considers himself a mentor.