By Reid Forgrave, The Des Moines Register  Jay Harkless shut the door on his friend. By that point, what else could he do?  Sure, he'd been close friends with Mark Becker since third grade, when Becker challenged him to race on the playground. Becker beat him, of course. The big kid was always deceptively fast, on the elementary playground, then later on the football field, where as a linebacker Becker played varsity as a sophomore.  Lately, though — and there's really no way around this — Becker had been getting weird. All their friends had noticed Becker's recent changes: More introverted. More self-conscious. And more comments that seemed out of nowhere, like telling friends he'd been battling demons in his dreams all night. Less and less did he resemble the quietly confident, popular young man they had known for years.  Now, at 24, Becker sits in the Cerro Gordo County Jail. He is accused of murder in the shooting of Ed Thomas, their football coach at Aplington-Parkersburg High School, the man who led a traumatized town to recovery after last year's tornado. Becker awaits a hearing Thursday on his mental competency, which will determine whether he will stand trial.  And Harkless is left to replay in his head scenes from one cold night last November.  Harkless was lying in bed, struggling to sleep. The doorbell rang at his Cedar Falls apartment. It was 3 a.m.  He jumped up and opened the front door.  He wasn't surprised to see Becker: bundled up in a winter coat, pupils dilated, eyes sunken and encircled with dark rings. Anymore, Harkless felt he hardly knew his old friend.  "He just said, 'Hey, can I crash here? I don't have any other place to stay right now.' "  Becker, Harkless knew, was high. Harkless recognized the signs from when they used to do meth together, which for a couple of years after high school was pretty often. But Harkless had stopped a few years earlier, while Becker had fallen in deeper. Becker's parents had tried to keep their son away from drugs. They tried to help with his increasingly debilitating mental problems. Nothing, from sending him to live with his older brother out of state to sending him to rehab, seemed to stick.  On this night, Harkless was happy to have an excuse: His girlfriend was sleeping over.  "I turned him away," Harkless recalled. "I said, 'Dude, I got some company right now. I don't know if this is a good night for you to stay over here.' I saw it in his face that he was hurting. But I wasn't bothered enough by it, because I didn't trust him."  And Harkless shut the door.  "He was becoming more and more mentally unstable," Harkless said. "Sometimes I'd see a look in his face, he was mad at me, and we were such good friends for so long that he wouldn't say it. And that right there, if you let a person keep boiling up and boiling up inside, that's the kind of (stuff) that happens. They snap one day. I was scared something bad was going to happen. I didn't trust him to sleep in my house when I was there."  Harkless' voice softened. He shook his head.  "And that," he said, "was the last time I saw him."  Like so many in Parkersburg, Harkless can't reconcile the two images of Mark Becker swirling in his head.  There's the Mark Becker of just five years ago, in his 2004 senior yearbook photo, a good-looking kid, short hair gelled and combed forward, sleeves rolled up on his Oxford shirt. There's a quote below his picture: "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone."  That Mark Becker was unfailingly polite — he always asked friends' parents for permission to use their bathroom, even after being a frequent visitor for years. That Mark Becker fixed up his old Monte Carlo with his dad, played guitar in a band, always answered his mom's call to help Dad with chores. And sure, that Mark Becker liked to party — drink a little beer, smoke a little weed — but he wouldn't hurt a fly.  That's the Mark Becker old friends say they know.  Then there's the Mark Becker of the police mug shot: the long hair, the sunken eyes, the dour expression. This Mark Becker compiled an extensive criminal record in recent years, complete with charges of possession of drug paraphernalia, assault, eluding police and, finally, first-degree murder. This Mark Becker was hooked on meth, according to friends. This Mark Becker suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, according to his attorney. And days before the shooting, this Mark Becker was arrested for vandalism and taken by police to Covenant Medical Center in Waterloo for a psychiatric evaluation.  This is the Mark Becker old friends — and even his own family — say they hardly recognize.  "The Mark the '04 grads knew is not the Mark you see today," one old friend wrote in a Facebook message. "There is a picture in our class of '04 yearbook ... Mark in his football jersey with a thumbs-up. That's the Mark we knew."  "Mark has always been and always will be one of my best friends," wrote another.  "He was just one of those guys you have to give a hug," said Sara Madsen, 23, who went to school with Becker from kindergarten through high school and remained friends afterward. "He'd just make you smile. ... He was just a good kid who made bad decisions, and kept making bad decisions until he made the ultimate bad decision."  Most old friends would rather not talk about him. Only a handful replied to scores of e-mails, Facebook messages and telephone messages asking about the friend they grew up with. Most who did reply preferred not to comment. People in Parkersburg knew Mark Becker as a good boy from a good family, and they revered coach Thomas as a good man and a good Christian. Reconciling the intersection of those two lives has proved difficult.  Even as the town walks through its moments of healing — the coach's memorial service where lines stretched for blocks, the first football practice where coaches tried to bring life back to normal, the opening of the new high school after the tornado destroyed the old one, the nationally televised opening football game that featured a touching documentary on the coach — the town is not healed. Maybe healing will come after the trial, if there is a trial. Maybe never.  For Harkless, none of this makes sense. After all, the most powerful memory of his childhood involves these two men. In the high school gym, Mark Becker sat at his side. The boys concentrated intensely on the man they looked up to as a mentor. And only one booming voice could be heard: Ed Thomas, preparing his young men for a Friday night battle.  Let's be clear: Harkless and Becker did some bad stuff together.  First, it was smoking weed in high school. That angered their parents but, Harkless said, was no big deal. The friends cruised the streets of Parkersburg, listening to hip-hop and laughing at each other's lame attempts at freestyle rap. That Mark Becker was fun, polite, just a cool guy.  Then, after high school, they got into harder drugs. Their parents' anger turned to worry. The two friends would sit around together, getting high, watching the Chevy Chase movie "Nothing but Trouble" over and over, downloading hair metal music, shouting the lyrics at the top of their lungs. After one particularly long binge, Harkless decided he was sick of the lifestyle and quit meth. Becker kept going. Soon, Becker devolved into a state of self-consciousness and drug addiction and often seemed to be having conversations with himself.  At a darkened bar in Iowa City on a recent afternoon, Harkless relived the evolution of their friendship. Slowly, more images of Mark Becker tumbled out.  There Becker was, at his own birthday party during elementary school, a sleepover at the Becker house. Becker's parents made a bonfire, and the next morning, Becker showed Harkless how to go duck hunting.  There Becker was, driving his Monte Carlo around Parkersburg, blasting hard rock. Everyone knew him by that car. Some even called him Monte.  There Becker was, the reliable buddy, the only friend Harkless told when he was running away from home at age 15.  "You know what he did?" Harkless recalled, laughing. "He's like, 'Well, do you need any money?' I'm not even old enough to have my license. He gave me $14. I was like, 'This guy is going to be my friend until the day I die.' "  And there Becker was, the only one of Harkless' friends waiting for him at the airport. Back in high school, Harkless got in trouble and was sent to boarding school. Becker was the only friend who came to the airport to welcome him after a year away from home.  Harkless hasn't seen that Mark Becker in years. There was an incident after high school when Becker spent some time at a hospital for mental issues and anxiety problems. Maybe it was related to drug use; maybe it wasn't.  All Harkless knows is, after that, Becker left town for a stint and lived with his brother in South Dakota. He returned, then everyone watched him get worse.  Whether the mental illness caused Becker to seek refuge in drugs, or whether the drugs amplified his mental illness, nobody knows.  "It started out something small," Harkless said. "Just a slight change in his personality. Like he was more self-conscious, debilitatingly self-conscious. That's the way it got in the end, at least. ...  "You could see him talking to himself on his face. He'd just get this face, and you could see him battling, you could see him struggling with something in his own head. And he was starting to say weird stuff. Socially he was becoming more and more awkward. ...  "He started getting to that point where it was bothering himself that he was doing things. He didn't even want to admit it to his closest friends. ...  "(After a while) it wasn't anymore about him being high. It was him being a person that he was paranoid about. A person that people liked. It bothered him to the core that his friends weren't his friends anymore. And you could tell. He just wasn't the same guy, man. You have a friend for a reason, and that's because you got something in common. ... And it just wasn't like that anymore."  Harkless paused, took a breath. All this, he said, just seems too surreal.  "You can see why it's really just amazing that it went from that point to this point," Harkless said. "How are we even sitting here, talking about one of my best friends killing one of the guys we grew up being influenced by?"  Mark Becker's mom answered the telephone at the house where she raised her three sons, on 38 acres north of Parkersburg.  Joan Becker knows there are no easy answers to the question that lingers in Parkersburg: Why? She knows the answer lies within her son Mark's mental illness.  "We never hid his mental illness and the issues Mark has dealt with the last couple years," she said, kind and polite as always. "We never hid them from our church or the community. Unfortunately, in society today, too many people hide their mental illnesses."  The Beckers didn't hide it, but that didn't mean people understood it. Even her family didn't understand, she said, until this past Easter, when Mark had an "episode" in front of family.  But she wouldn't go into specifics. Not yet. It's attorney's orders. This week's mental competency hearing determines whether her son is fit to stand trial — which Mark Becker's attorney argues he is not.  Her few public comments have focused on thanking the community for wrapping its arms around her and her husband — as well as the youngest of their three sons, Scott, a senior football player at Aplington-Parkersburg High School. After last year's EF5 tornado tore through town, Joan Becker watched Ed Thomas espouse the value of community and the importance of jumping back to your feet after getting knocked down. And even after his death, Ed Thomas and his strong Christian faith have taught this town the lesson of forgiveness.  "He wasn't just my husband's coach or our Sunday school teacher," she said of the man who coached her husband and her sons on the football field, "but Ed was a very, very dear friend of our family in the deepest sense of the word."  At the Iowa City bar, Harkless took a sip of beer. He looked down at the table, shook his head.  Harkless, now 23 and a University of Iowa student, just wants to know the same thing everyone else wants to know.  What was Mark Becker thinking when he walked into the makeshift weight room on the morning of June 24 and allegedly shot his former coach? Was he high and on a rampage? Or had his mental illness really gotten that bad?  Or was he so angry at the world that he decided to hurt the one person he knew everybody cared about?  Harkless sighed. He had been talking about his old friend for hours. He leaned forward. His voice became quiet.  "Thing is, I feel bad for him," Harkless said. "Because I know he loved Thomas. I know he did — at least, at one point in his life. And I know he's sitting there right now, probably torn up from that."  The Des Moines Register is owned by Gannett, the parent company of USA TODAY.  You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. 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Many in the Applington-Parkersburg (Iowa) high school community are still trying to come to terms with the shooting death of football coach Ed Thomas. Now there are details about his alleged killer, a former player.