Steroids: one teen's tale: Efrain Marrero wanted to bulk up for football. After his death, at 19, steroids are called the culprit.

Brenda Marrero came upon her son Efrain surfing the Internet one day, last October at their home in Vacaville, a town in Northern California. When Efrain hid what was on the screen, she asked what he had been looking at. He turned and said he wanted to tell her something: He was using steroids.

She called her husband, Frank, and they told Efrain he needed to stop, because steroids are dangerous.

"But Barry Bonds does it, his parents remember Efrain saying.

"That doesn't make it right," his father responded.

To please his parents, Efrain handed over a dozen pink pills, a vial of liquid, and two syringes. His mother flushed the pills and kept the vial. Efrain, who played football, promised to stop using steroids. It was a promise that no one doubts he kept.

Less than a month later, Brenda Marrero found Efrain in a bedroom at home, a bullet in his head, a .22-caliber pistol in his hand. He left no explanation for his suicide. He had no history of depression or mental illness. He was 19.

"We didn't see it coming," his mother tearfully recalls. "We were absolutely devastated."

In the weeks that followed, the Marreros found out that their son had been surrounded by steroids; his sister's boyfriend, co-workers at the mall, and weight lifters at his gym used steroids. And when Efrain went off to college, a number of players on the football team he joined were using steroids.

FINDING AN EXPLANATION

Not until they learned what steroid withdrawal can do to a teenager's hormones did the Marreros find a plausible explanation for Efrain s suicide: The family, their doctor, and their friends think that Efrain fell into an emotional abyss from having suddenly stopped using steroids. Two previous suicides of young athletes had been attributed by their parents to steroid use: Rob Garibaldi, 24, of Petaluma, Calif., in 2002, and Taylor Hooton, 17, of Piano, Tex., in 2003. The athletes, both baseball players, died shortly after they stopped using steroids.

Though a definitive link between steroids and suicide has not been proved, medical experts say there is persuasive anecdotal evidence and a reasonable biological explanation for a connection. When someone takes steroids, the body suppresses its natural production of testosterone. After a person stops, it takes weeks or months to produce normal levels again, leaving some but not all people vulnerable to profound mood changes.

A SERIOUS PROBLEM

The three suicides, while extreme, have underscored for many medical experts the risks linked to withdrawal from steroids and shined a light on the use of steroids among young athletes. In a 2004 survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2.4 percent of 10th-graders and 3.4 percent of 12th-graders said they had used steroids at least once.

In addition to their effects on mood, steroids can also cause serious physical and medical problems, ranging from tendon weakness and severe acne to high blood pressure and even cancer, medical experts say; and steroids can stunt growth in adolescents.

Efrain's suicide occurred in a region where the steroids scandal involving the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), a sports-nutrition center, has dominated news coverage for nearly two years. In San Francisco, about 50 miles southwest of Vacaville, federal prosecutors brought steroid distribution charges against four men who were accused of providing steroids to elite athletes. In July, three of the men, including Barry Bonds's personal trainer, pleaded guilty, while a fourth pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. (Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger who is one of baseball's greatest home-run hitters, reportedly told a grand jury investigating the case that he may have unknowingly taken steroids, thinking they were legal health supplements, a claim that many sports commentators have found difficult to believe.)

In Sacramento, 35 miles east of Vacaville, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has admitted that he used steroids during his career as a bodybuilder, though he says young people should never take steroids.

The Marreros moved to Vacaville when Efrain was 10. Frank Marrero is a pilot for United Airlines and an Air Force Reserve colonel. The family picked Vacaville for the quality of life and the schools. "Everything we ever did," he says, "we did for our kids."

Efrain, who lived with his father, mother, a younger sister, and baby brother in a four-bedroom house, turned 14 in 1998, the year Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs. Pretty soon he asked his parents if he could use creatine, an amino acid that helps to build muscle mass. Creatine, he observed, was sold in health-food stores, and a lot of teenagers used it. But his parents said no.

Efrain was always one of the biggest boys in his class, and he grew to be 6 feet 1 inch and 270 pounds. He played offensive line for four years at Vacaville High School and at one point talked to his friends about androstenedione (a hormone supplement that acts like a steroid in the body), which was used by McGwire. "He said it's a legal steroid you can buy, and you rub it on and it makes your fat go away," says Rob Cullinan, Efrain's best friend. "He was always big and fast, but he always wanted an edge."

'I'D BE THE LAST TO KNOW'

Efrain also talked about steroids with his sister Erika's boyfriend, Erik Svendsen, who had injected himself with steroids to bulk up for football his senior year at Vacaville High School. Svendsen acknowledges that he had sold some steroids to Efrain about two years earlier, but says he thought Efrain had sold them to someone else.

"That stuff is everywhere here," Svendsen says. "It's pretty easy to get if you know the right people at the gym and stuff. You can pretty much look at people and know who to talk to."

Ed Santopadre, the football coach at Vacaville High, says he was unaware of a problem with steroids among his players. "But you know, I'd be the last to know," he says. "They'd try to keep it from me."

Santopadre says he's perplexed by Efrain's use of steroids, describing him as a nice young man and a talented player. "He was quick, big, strong, and hit like a truck," Santopadre says. "He didn't need them."

After high school, Efrain was recruited to play football in 2002 at the College of the Siskiyous, a two-year college in a town 250 miles north of Vacaville. He joined a family friend, Casey Lee, who was a receiver and co-captain of the Siskiyous Eagles. Lee, along with other former players, say the Siskiyous football program was awash in steroids.

"I don't want to bad-mouth my school, but there were at least a dozen people I know of who were on steroids," Lee says, adding: "It was in-your-face. It was easy to get. It was not looked on as a big deal. Coaches didn't see it. I don't know if they wanted to or not."

Efrain left the college after one year, telling friends it was too remote. He lived with his family, worked at several local stores, and enrolled at Solano Community College, near home.

He could not play football because of poor grades, but he hit the gym and planned to play the following year. He talked about his competition being bigger than ever. By then, his friends were certain he was taking steroids. "He showed me what he was taking, and it was a lot more than anybody else," says Kenny Groen, a friend of Efrain's from Vacaville.

MUSCLE-BOUND & MOODY

When he confessed to his parents, Efrain said he had been taking steroids for six months, but his parents and friends think it was longer than that, perhaps years. They had seen a change in his physique--less fat, more muscle--and he had started wearing tighter clothes. His parents noticed mood swings, too, but they chalked it up to adolescence.

After Efrain admitted using steroids, Frank Marrero consulted with the family's longtime physician, Dr. Robert A. Varady, about Efrain. Varady assured Efrain's father that the steroids would gradually leave his son's system, and recommended he get counseling.

"So I thought, OK, we talked to the doctor," Brenda Marrero says. "We tried to do everything right."

Efrain had set up a counseling session at his parents' urging. He never made it. He shot himself the day before.

"It's really such a shocker," Cathy Lee, a friend of Brenda Marrero's, says. "Knowing Efrain, he was so caring, that's why I know something in his mind was altered. He just wouldn't have done that to his family, caused that kind of pain."

After Efrain's death, his sister, Erika, who is captain of the cheerleading squad at Vacaville High, broke up with Svendsen, her boyfriend of two years.

"I couldn't forgive him, because I thought he had some contribution to it," she says. She wipes tears from her eyes. "It's hard. You start to realize he's really gone."

Duff Wilson in Vacaville, Calif.

Duff Wilson is a sports reporter for The New York Times.