Warning: This story contains mentions of suicide and may be triggering to some readers.

Luis Gerardo Salazar was born on April 2, 1985 in Mexico City and moved to the United States when he was eight years old with our family. He was the middle of three children with one brother and one sister. He was very athletic from the time he was young. He started playing football when he was 10 years old, and he was also a very talented track and field runner in middle school. When Luis was in 7th grade, he attended the Junior Olympics in Florida and finished second in the nation for the 100-meter run.

He was always the captain of the football team wherever he would play. He was known for being the hardest hitter during drills, especially in the infamous “bull in the ring” drill.

At the time, nobody knew how dangerous it was to be hit in the head repeatedly. My parents started noticing my brother’s behavior change when he was in 8th grade. He had radical mood changes and would show signs of violence. On August 23, 1999, my brother took his own life at home. He was 14 years old.

We later found out that on the morning of his death, he had been challenged by the varsity football team at the high school he was set to attend in a month to do the “hit” drill and he beat them all. We also learned Luis had been violent in parties in the prior six months. If anyone would make him upset, he would get very violent, which was very unlike him. He was loved by his peers, teachers, coaches, and family. He was one of a kind.  If I had a dollar for every time someone told me “Your brother was my best friend,” I would be a millionaire.

The main reason why I want to share my brother’s story is to help other families like ours. There might be families out there who have no idea why someone who is a great athlete, popular, and who has a lot of friends, would choose to take their own life. I know our family had no answers for a long time. I follow pro wrestling, and so Chris Benoit’s death opened my eyes to what CTE is and how it can affect people. I started reading about concussions and CTE and that’s when I finally knew what had happened to my brother. I knew that his mood and entire personality changed because of the repeated hits to the head he suffered playing football. At the time he played, it was encouraged to be violent and hit hard. No one knew about the dangers of head hits.

Families need to be aware of the impact concussions and repeated hits to the head can have on their children. Studies have shown that people with concussion histories have an increased risk of mental health issues, including suicide. If we knew what we knew now, maybe we could have helped Luis get help and treatment and he’d still be here with us. My heart goes out to other former players like Luis who may be struggling due to the hits they took. Know you are not alone. Your family and friends love you and want you here with us.

If you are struggling to cope and would like some emotional support, call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 to connect with a trained counselor. It’s free, confidential, and available to everyone in the United States. You do not have to be suicidal to call. If you’re not comfortable talking on the phone, consider using the Lifeline Crisis Chat at 988lifeline.org/chat.

Nathan Stiles wanted to keep playing

SPRING HILL, Kan. — The first time Ron Stiles thought something might be wrong with his son Nathan, the boy was sprinting toward the end zone on a 65-yard touchdown run.

Dad couldn’t have been more proud. In his son’s final game of his senior year, the 17-year-old captain and homecoming king, a selfless soul who seemingly everyone looked up to, had broken loose for the longest touchdown run of his life. But some 20 yards before Nathan reached the end zone, Ron Stiles saw something unusual.

“It looked like something had hit him, like he was about to trip over his own feet,” Ron said. “It was strange. Something just didn’t look right.”

A few plays later, on defense, Nathan missed a tackle that led to a touchdown. “It just didn’t seem like him,” Ron said. But no one else seemed to notice. Not Nathan’s Spring Hill Broncos teammates. Not his coaches. Not even his mom, who told her husband to stop picking on their son.

But a few minutes before halftime, the kid known as “Superman” awkwardly walked off the field, screaming that his head hurt. An assistant coach grabbed Nathan and asked a string of questions: What’s your name? Where are you? What are your parents’ names? What school do you play for? With tears filling his eyes, Nathan answered every question correctly. As the coach turned to find a trainer, Nathan attempted to stand. But he fell to the ground, unconscious.

Immediately, a trainer ran over. Paramedics were called. A doctor from the opposing sidelines was summoned. Ron and Connie Stiles sprinted to their son’s side.

“He didn’t look good. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t responding. I knew it was serious,” Connie said. “But I kept thinking he would just wake up.”

The coaches urged Connie to talk to her son in hopes that he would respond. She hoped the memory of his favorite chocolate-covered snack mix might help.

“I kept saying, ‘Come on, Bubby. Come on. I’ll make you puppy chow if you wake up. You love puppy chow.”

For a brief second, Nathan raised his left arm. Then it fell.

He never moved his body again.

The decision to play

It was a few minutes before 5:30 on that summer morning in August when Nathan burst into his parents’ room to wake up his mom. Two-a-day football practices were starting, and Nathan couldn’t play until one of his parents signed a form acknowledging that they were aware of the symptoms and potential dangers of a concussion.

It was the first year that Spring Hill required a signed form to play. Given the added attention to concussion safety nationally, as well as recommendations from the Kansas State High School Activities Association, the Spring Hill School District decided that no form equaled no play.

It was just like Nathan to wait until the last minute. As smart and detail-oriented as he was in the classroom — a 4.0 GPA, a member of the National Honor Society, a Kansas Honors Scholar — he was just as absent-minded outside of it. He drove his mother crazy by losing his cell phone and his iPod. Passengers in his silver Dodge Intrepid were often nervous because he didn’t always pay attention to the road.

And so Nathan stood there that morning, handing his mom the Spring Hill Concussion Information Form. It began, “A concussion is a brain injury and all brain injuries are serious.”

“He was like, ‘Mama, Mama, sign this. I need you to sign this so I can go play,'” Connie recalled. “So I glance at the paper and it says something about concussions, blah, blah, blah. I knew there were new guidelines. I had heard about the form. So I signed it, gave it back to him and went to bed. I didn’t think twice about it.”

With concussion awareness at an all-time high, it was a scene that was surely replicated in homes all across the country last summer. Issues surrounding return to play, second-impact syndrome and even a potential connection between head trauma and ALS has put everyone from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to Pee Wee parents on high alert. The story won’t go away. This week, the talk is of University of Texas sophomore running back Tre’ Newton quitting the sport after suffering a concussion Nov. 6. On the other end of the spectrum there’s Pittsburgh receiver Hines Ward, who criticized Steelers trainers after they refused to let him return to last Sunday’s game against New England following a suspected concussion.

On the morning Nathan handed his mom that piece of paper, he wasn’t thinking about any of this. He had no idea what was ahead. He had no clue that two months later, he’d be diagnosed with a concussion. Or that 10 days after that, in his second game back, he would find himself unconscious on the sideline, fighting for his life.

The Stiles family has lived in Spring Hill, a fast-growing community 35 miles southwest of Kansas City, forever. Both Ron and Connie’s great grandparents attended Spring Hill High. But on that night, Nathan would go from a kid people only knew in town to a nationally-recognized example of the potential for disaster after a brain injury.

Suddenly, the sentence on the concussion awareness form that read “all concussions are potentially serious and may result in complications including prolonged brain damage and death” referred to him.

And Nathan wasn’t even sure he wanted to play football this year. Basketball was his sport. Despite his chiseled arms, broad shoulders and reputation as a tough guy, he was a softy. He was the first one at church each Sunday morning so he could hug the elderly ladies as they arrived. He would sit at the kitchen table each morning and, in between bites of Cheerios and hot water, wrap his arms around his mom and tell her he loved her.

He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t drink. He didn’t believe in premarital sex. From the age of 9, he embraced God, religion and the importance of spirituality. While other little kids would watch cartoons on Sunday mornings, Nathan would watch preachers. “And then he’d tell me which ones were good and which weren’t,” Connie said. “Who does that?”

He was a jock. He was a nerd. He was churchy. “And yet he still fit in with us bad kids,” joked Adam Nunn, a close friend. “He was just like one of the guys. Only way, way better. The kid would do anything for anybody.”

Nathan hated attention. He refused to ever buy a letterman’s jacket. When a youth basketball coach once asked Nathan’s team why they couldn’t “be more like Stiles,” he fumed.

“He just loved his buddies,” his dad said. “And he never wanted them to ever be hurt or upset or embarrassed about anything.”

When those buddies decided to play football this fall, Nathan joined them. But three practices into the season, Nathan broke his hand and needed a plate and six screws to piece it back together. When he couldn’t practice, he ran sprints on the sidelines. His friends said he even lifted weights when doctors told him not to.

“He was a competitor. He always wanted to win,” said Eric Kahn, one of Nathan’s closest friends. “He was the type of guy who would always suck it up. If he was injured, he’d fight through it and see if it would just go away. And then if it didn’t, maybe he would ask somebody for help.”

So it was surprising for Connie on the morning of Oct. 2 when her son mentioned that his head hurt. The night before, she and Ron had joined Nathan on the field as he was named homecoming king. After the game, a 17-0 loss to Ottawa, Nathan went out with his friends. Everything seemed normal. Except that comment the next day.

At practice three days later, in his first contact drills since the game, Nathan complained to his coaches about his head hurting.

“Every time he made contact, he said he got a headache,” coach Anthony Orrick said. “So I immediately told him right there he was done for the day.”

The next morning, a trainer from the school called Connie and suggested she take Nathan to see a doctor. Connie took him to the Olathe Medical Center, where Nathan underwent a series of tests, including a CT scan. The doctors found nothing, Connie recalled.

“They said he was fine, probably had a concussion,” Connie said. “They told him ‘Take two [naproxen] in the morning and two at night and go see the doctor next week.'”

When he visited the family doctor the next week, Nathan confessed he was still having occasional headaches. So the doctor suggested he sit out another week. Seven days later, after Nathan passed a series of tests and said he was headache-free, the doctor cleared him to return to the field. But Nathan wouldn’t do so without the approval of his mother. “You need to be OK with this,” he said to her. “Are you OK with this?”

She wasn’t. Connie hadn’t wanted him to play in the first place. During his sophomore year, he broke his collarbone in a precarious spot under his neck that was a mere inches from severing an artery and potentially killing him. Then there was the broken hand. And now a concussion. Connie thought of a story Ron had told the children’s ministry one morning at church, in which God sends three boats to rescue a drowning man and the man refuses to get in all three boats, thinking God himself will save him. The man eventually drowns.

“I told him, ‘Nathan, this is your third boat,'” she recalled. “‘God sent you three boats. You’re going to drown. Don’t play. Just don’t play.'”

But Nathan insisted he was fine, and Connie didn’t see any abnormal behavior. Nathan was staying up late, finishing his homework and had just earned a 93 on a big calculus test. He wanted to finish the season with his friends. And with only two games remaining, one against Osawatomie, the other one-win team in the area, Connie assumed her son would be safe. So she reluctantly told him he could play.

On Friday, Oct. 22, Nathan returned to the field for Spring Hill’s game against undefeated Paola. Ron and Connie watched nervously in the stands as their son absorbed several hard hits, including one in the beginning of the game that they said noticeably stunned him.

“But after that game, all he said was how great he felt,” Ron said. “He was so happy. He said, ‘That was a lot of fun. They got me there for a minute, but I’m OK. I had a blast tonight.'”

‘I told him I would miss him’

The television in the surgical waiting room at the University of Kansas Medical Center was tuned to Home and Garden Television. Connie Stiles would have it no other way. Nathan had been airlifted from Osawatomie’s Lynn Dickey Field, and she and Ron had made the one-hour drive to the hospital, where doctors informed them their son’s brain was severely swollen and hemorrhaging. He would need four-hour emergency surgery to stop the bleeding, slow the swelling and, hopefully, save his life.

So while Nathan was in surgery, the easy-on-the-nerves home and garden network it would be. As the Stiles waited, friends, family and teachers began overflowing three hospital waiting rooms. At first, nurses urged the crowd to keep out of the hallway. But they eventually gave up. In each of the waiting rooms, crowds of people kneeled on the hospital floor, praying to God to save Nathan.

One hour into surgery, doctors realized their task was impossible. Nathan’s brain was so swollen that it had stopped telling his heart and lungs what to do. He had been living on 50 percent oxygen for as long as two hours. Even if he were to live, his life would never be the same.

The doctors told the Stiles family there was nothing more they could do. “It’s in God’s hands now,” one surgeon said.

“The news started out bad and got worse,” Ron said. “I knew it was serious. But I never imagined I’d be driving home with a dead son.

“But no matter what we said or what we did, it didn’t matter. God was calling him home.”

Not everyone accepted Nathan’s fate as easily. Ron said he had never seen the family’s pastor, Laurie Johnston, so upset.

“She thought we were going to pray that boy back to life,” he said.

Said Johnston: “I was mad. I was angry. Here I was, the shepherd of their family, and I couldn’t protect their sheep. To me, this wasn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t let it happen. Not Nathan. Not someone who had so much left to give this world. But at some point I realized, it was out of my control.”

As the clock crept past 2 in the morning on Oct. 29, Nathan was still alive. But his future was bleak. Ron and Connie decided it was time to start saying goodbye. They made the decision to allow each of Nathan’s friends go in to his room in groups of four to do just that.

It took almost an hour and a half. With each group, Nathan slipped farther and farther away. Just before 4 a.m., the last group walked in. They were Nathan’s closest friends.

“When I saw him … I just saw him earlier that day,” said Kahn, who kicked for Spring Hill and also played on the soccer team. “The last thing he ever said to me was ‘Win state.’ But seeing him in that bed … my best friend … looking like that … I told him I would miss him. And basketball wouldn’t be the same.”
Handling the grief and the guilt

Handling the grief and the guilt

The morning Nathan died, the phone rang in the office of Gary French, the superintendent for the Osawatomie School District. It was Ron Stiles.

“I was a bit nervous when it was him,” French said. “I had no idea what to expect.”

But Stiles wasn’t calling to complain, criticize or do anything else negative. He called to say “thank you” for the way Osawatomie handled his son’s crisis. He asked how the kids and the coaches were doing and if there was anything he could do.

“Here this man had just lost his son and he was worried about everybody else,” French said. “It was an amazing display of faith and humanity. It was inspirational.”

A day later, when word got back to Stiles that some of the Osawatomie kids were teasing one of the football players, calling him a “murderer” because of one play in which they thought he had collided with Nathan (he hadn’t), Stiles called French again.

“He told me he had heard what was going on and wasn’t going to stand for it,” French said. “What could he do? Could he call the boy? Did he need to drive down? He wanted to talk to the kid.”

Within 15 minutes Stiles was on the phone with the player, telling him Nathan’s death wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.

In the three weeks since their son died, the Stiles family has spread that message to anyone and everyone who will listen. In a statement broadcast on each of the Kansas City television affiliates, Ron said, “We absolutely do not hold any bitterness to anyone for what happened.” He added that there will be no lawsuits. What happened to his son will be determined “by doctors and not lawyers.”

Everywhere they’ve gone since that night, Ron, 55, and Connie, 48, have tried to spread this message: to Nathan’s coaches, his teammates, his friends, a member of the officiating crew that night and even his girlfriend, whom the Stiles said battled feelings of guilt after not sharing that Nathan had felt dizzy one day after working out.

“My daughter told me that she was pretty much headed the wrong way with all of this,” said Susan Swope, the mother of Courtney Swope, Nathan’s girlfriend. “But when you see the way the Stiles have handled it you can’t help but do everything within your power to stay strong.”

Connie also met for an hour with the family physician who had cleared Nathan to play. The doctor declined to speak with ESPN for this story.

“He felt horrible,” Connie said. “He was in tears. He felt so bad. He told me he kept going through everything over and over and over and he didn’t see anything he would have done differently. He told me he had lost his faith in medicine.

“I said, ‘Please don’t feel that way. It’s not your fault. You’re a good doctor. We need more doctors like you.'”

Ron and Connie also met with some 25 members of the Osawatomie football team who showed up at a ceremony to remember Nathan. The parents explained to the tear-filled teenagers that the entire night was crazy, none of it made sense. Not the eye-popping 99-72 final score of the game, more points than the two teams had tallied in their previous 19 games combined. And certainly not what happened to Nathan. It wasn’t their fault, the Stiles insisted. Football did not kill Nathan. But the kids couldn’t stop crying. So Ron pointed to a giant picture of his son in the front of the room.

“I told them, ‘You see that smile my son has on his face?'” Ron said. “I want to see that exact same smile on every one of your faces right now.”

People in the community have marveled at the way the Stiles have handled this tragedy. But for them, it’s the only way. By telling everyone else that they don’t believe this tragedy is anyone’s fault, they’re telling themselves the same thing.

Because of course there are questions. Ron and Connie constantly replay the nightmare in their heads, wondering what went wrong. A couple of days after Nathan’s death, Ron was looking through his son’s car and found a piece of paper lying on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat. It was a concussion management handout the family doctor had handed Nathan after clearing him to play.

“I saw that and I just thought, ‘Oh, Nathan; oh, no,'” Ron said.

Was Nathan having headaches the entire time and didn’t tell anyone? Did he suffer a brain hemorrhage after the initial concussion? If he did, why didn’t that show up on his CT scan? What about the hard hits he took in the Paola game? Did that play a role in any of this? That night in the hospital, doctors explained to the Stiles that the location where Nathan was hemorrhaging was an “old bleed,” meaning it was a spot where the brain had bled previously.

“One of the doctors said he didn’t think we could just blame it on the CT scan, that they didn’t catch it or whatever,” Connie said. “And so I made the comment, ‘Do you mean I could have just found him dead in bed one morning?’ And he said ‘Yes.'”

The answers won’t come until the medical examiner releases the autopsy report and the official cause of death in the coming weeks. In addition, sports concussion expert Dr. Robert Cantu and his researchers from Boston University and the Sports Legacy Institute will be reviewing Nathan’s case and will share their findings with the family. Cantu has authored more than 325 scientific publications and 22 books on neurology and sports medicine, including a September article in the Journal of Neurotrauma about second-impact syndrome and small subdural hematomas, or brain bleeds. Though he had yet to review Nathan’s CT scan or paperwork, Cantu said last week that the case “had all the earmarks” of a brain bleed caused by second-impact syndrome.

But for now, we just don’t know. It’s possible that what happened that night had nothing to do with Nathan’s previous concussion. Or he might have suffered from a brain-related problem completely unrelated to football.

Just last week, Connie came across a magazine story that suggested anyone suffering from a brain injury shouldn’t take any non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications because they might complicate clotting. Connie had found a nearly empty bottle of an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory shortly after Nathan’s death. Should he not have been taking it? Should she have put her foot down that day in the doctor’s office and told him no, he couldn’t play? Would it have even mattered? And what about Nathan’s role in all of this? Was he hiding something?

“Even if he was, what kid thinks, ‘Oh, I’m going to die from a headache?'” Connie said. “He’s a 17-year-old kid. They don’t think they’re going to die from anything.”

For now, Ron is trying desperately to shift his family’s energy and focus from “what if?” to “what now?” This past Saturday, he stood in front of the congregation at Hillsdale Presbyterian Church, held Connie’s magazine with the article about brain injuries in his hand and tossed it in a garbage can.

“That isn’t what we want to be about,” he said.

A life frozen in time

In the bed where Nathan used to sleep, the sheets still rest in the same position in which he left them that morning when he climbed out of bed and headed for school.

The shirts in his closet are organized by color. On his desk, a neon green cup has a drop of water on the bottom. And on a shelf at the foot of his bed, the purple and white crown of the homecoming king sits, its gold sequins changing the direction they shine depending on the light of day.

The room tells the story of a life frozen in time and a family that has been left trying to make sense of it all. According to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, 1.8 million Americans play football each year. And Nathan is the only one this season who is believed to have died from a football-related injury. Essentially, he is a statistical anomaly.

But tell that to Ron, Connie and his younger sister Natalie, who now live in a home without the plodding feet and shower singing of their son and brother. Tell that to the elderly ladies at Hillsdale Presbyterian, who miss Nathan’s arms wrapping around them every Sunday morning. And tell that to the not-so-popular kids at Spring Hill High, whom Nathan would say hello to and stand up for as if they were the most popular kids in school.

“I’m not convinced that he wasn’t some sort of angel,” Coach Orrick said. “I know people will have a hard time believing that, but when you look at the type of person he was you can’t help but ask ‘How can I better myself?’

“I’m not sure Nate wasn’t put here on earth to do just that — to change a lot of us for the better.”

To try to make sense of it all, to give them a reason to get out of bed each morning, the Stiles have dedicated themselves to making sure their son doesn’t die without a purpose. They fulfilled Nathan’s wish, allowing the donation of his bone and tissue to those in need. But beyond that, and beyond working with doctors and researchers to determine exactly what went wrong, they’re committed to achieving one of Nathan’s lifelong goals: helping his friends find God.

Nathan, who would have turned 18 on Nov. 2, had often talked with his mom about the concerns he had for his friends who were choosing the wrong path and how he wished he could somehow get them to ask life’s biggest questions. And so the Saturday morning after Nathan’s death, Connie was lying in bed when the idea hit her: The Nathan Project.

Instead of flowers or donations to fight cancer or feed the needy, Ron and Connie have used the money they received after Nathan’s death — more than $14,000 — to purchase study Bibles. And they’ve given those Bibles to anyone who will dedicate themselves to one year of Bible study. Faith, denomination, previous beliefs; none of it matters. They just wanted to people to explore and learn about God — for Nathan.

“I had to make sense of this insanity,” Connie said. “I had to give myself a reason this happened and do something. Otherwise I was just going to wither away and die.”

One week after Nathan’s death, at the ceremony attended by the Osawatomie football team and some 3,000 others, a stack of 1,000 Bibles lined the back of the Spring Hill gym. And after Nathan’s coaches, teachers and family spoke, after his mom sang and his band mates played a Christian rock song he helped write, Johnston, the pastor, invited anyone in attendance to grab a Bible.

Within a few minutes, two lines four to five people wide stretched the entire length of the Spring Hill gym. Nearly 650 Bibles were given out that night. Since then, the project has spread to other towns and gradually, other states. Ron Stiles has started a Facebook account, and he encourages people to reach out to him if they need somebody to talk to.

And at every Nathan Project event, Ron — who has size 10 feet — wears his son’s black Nike high-tops.

Size 12.

“I’m never going to fill those shoes,” he said. “But I’m going to do everything I can to walk in them.”

Wayne Drehs is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at [email protected]. To find out more about The Nathan Project, visit Hillsdale Presbyterian’s web site, or search “The Nathan Project” on Facebook.

Did Football Kill Austin Trenum?

When a well-adjusted Virginia teen suddenly killed himself, his parents looked for warning signs they had missed. But Austin had no dark secret, no teen angst. There was nothing—except for a concussion he had sustained during a football game a few days earlier.

On the day he took his own life, Austin Trenum ate cheesecake. He was 17. He loved cheesecake. He loved the Beastie Boys, too, and SpongeBob Squarepants and the silly fauxhawk haircut he spent months cultivating and two minutes shaving off because, well, that’s what teenagers do. He loved his little Geo Metro convertible, neon yellow and as macho as a golf cart, a gift from his grandfather, the two driving all the way from Texas to Austin’s home in Nokesville, Virginia, a close-knit
community of 1,354 in Prince William County.

Austin loved his parents, Gil and Michelle, and his younger brothers, Cody and Walker. He loved his girlfriend, Lauren. He loved cheering for the girls’ volleyball team at Brentsville District High School, smearing his chest with paint and screaming his lungs out alongside his lacrosse teammates; loved sneaking out of his chemistry class to sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” with his friend Carmen in the band room; loved fishing and paintball, roller coasters and blasting “Sweet Caroline”
with the top down.

He especially loved football. Loved watching the Dallas Cowboys. Loved playing for the Brentsville varsity team—fullback and linebacker—taking hits and delivering them, seldom leaving the field, eating two Hostess cherry pies before every game. He was a handsome kid, green-eyed like his mother, six feet tall and 190 pounds, growing stronger and more confident all the time. Under the Friday-night lights, in his beat-up helmet and shoulder pads, you could see the man Gilbert Allen Austin Trenum III was becoming.

• • •

It was Sunday, September 26, 2010. Michelle Trenum woke up around 8 am. Gil was out of town, returning that afternoon from a weekend drill with his Navy Reserve unit in New Jersey. Walker, ten, their youngest, was on the living-room couch, hiding under a blanket. He jumped up when Michelle walked in. Boo!

“Austin’s awake,” Walker said. “He’s in the basement playing a video game.”

That’s odd, Michelle thought. Austin never got up early on Sundays. Not voluntarily.

Michelle made her sons breakfast. Austin drove his other brother, Cody, 15, to a lacrosse game and cheered from the sidelines. He took more pride in his siblings than himself; he was that kind of brother. On the way home, he teased Cody. “You did good,” Austin said, before delivering the punch line. “You surprised me!”

Back at the house, Austin ate lunch. And cheesecake. While Austin surfed the Internet, he and Michelle talked about Adam James, a Texas Tech football player who had allegedly been locked in a dark electrical closet by the school’s head coach, Mike Leach, after suffering a concussion. The story, which ultimately ignited a media firestorm and led to Leach’s firing, began when the injured James showed up to practice in sunglasses and street clothes; Austin joked with his mother that he should do the same, just to see how his high-school coach, Dean Reedy, would react.

Austin then turned serious, balancing on one foot to mimic a neurological test.

“Am I going to be out all week?” he said. “I don’t want to be out all week. Do you think I’ll be out two weeks?”

“You’ll just have to see,” Michelle said.

During a football game the previous Friday night, Austin had sustained a concussion. Brain trauma had been in the news. There were reports of retired NFL players suffering from depression and dementia linked to their hard-hitting careers. There were congressional hearings, some of them dealing with high-school football. In the coming months, the sport would be engulfed in a full-blown health crisis. Austin’s parents were mostly unaware of the controversy. They had both grown up in Texas,
where football was king, where getting your bell rung was just a part of the game. Almost a badge of honor.

• • •

Gil and Michelle had been in the Brentsville High bleachers on Friday night, chatting with friends, a full moon overhead. Neither of them saw the hit, but Gil spotted their son standing with his helmet off, touching his index finger to his nose at the direction of team trainer Richard Scavongelli. Just like last season. Good grief.

On the sideline, Austin was dazed, slurring his words. During the drive to the emergency room, he was alert enough to call Lauren, his girlfriend. By the time he was standing in line at Prince William Hospital, shirtless and sweaty, he seemed fine. He cracked jokes, flirted with the nurses who brought him a sandwich and a soda. He begged a doctor to let him leave, asked if Lauren could come back to the examination room.

A nurse asked if he wanted Tylenol.

“The last time you got a concussion, you got a headache,”
Michelle said. “Are you sure you don’t want it?”

“Mom, I’m fine,” Austin said. “I don’t have a headache. Except
for my normal football headache. I get them after every game.”

The medical staff gave Gil and Michelle a sheet of instructions: Watch for vomiting and clear fluid coming out of Austin’s nose, signs of a more severe brain injury. Limit their son to “quiet activities” for the next 24 hours. Wake him from sleep every few hours to check for evidence of intracranial bleeding, such as confusion and extreme
drowsiness.

Heading home, the Trenums stopped at the Chuck Wagon, a restaurant around the corner from their house, where the Brentsville High players gathered after games. Austin’s teammates recounted his sideline exchange with Scavongelli.

Scavongelli: “Do you know where you are?”

Austin: “Yeah. This is my field!”

Scavongelli: “No. Do you know what school you are at?”

Austin: “Yeah. My school!”

Scavongelli: “Do you know who you’re playing against?”

Austin: “No.”

This is my field! Everyone laughed. They laughed at the way Austin had gotten emotional on the field, too, cussing out one of his buddies, something he never, ever did.

On Saturday morning, Austin attended football film study; that afternoon, he went fishing; in the evening, he took Lauren to a Sugarland concert, a belated celebration of her birthday. They sat on the Jiffy Lube Live lawn, taking pictures under the stars. When Austin got home, he texted Lauren good night. The next day, he was sitting in his family’s dining room doing homework, texting her again about meeting up two hours later to watch a Redskins game.

Austin was a good student, ranking in the top 6 percent of his class. He planned to study chemical engineering in college and was deciding between Virginia Tech and James Madison. The former had a better football team; the latter, he deduced during a campus visit, had better-looking girls. As Austin studied for his Cold War history class, Michelle went online to check his academic progress. There was a problem. He hadn’t turned in two papers. Michelle was upset and lectured him about slacking off.

Gil came home around 2:30 pm. Michelle gave her husband a kiss and cut him a slice of cheesecake. She told him about Austin’s schoolwork. Austin looked irritated—almost angry. That was out of character. Michelle saw his jaw clench. His mouth moved. She was stunned. Did he just call me a name? Austin stared straight ahead.

“If you don’t finish your work,” she said, “you can’t see Lauren tonight.”

Gil and Michelle went outside. Cody and Walker were on the living-room couch, watching a football game. At some point, Austin went upstairs.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with Austin,” Michelle said. “He shouldn’t disrespect me like that.”

“He’s a teenager,” Gil said. “I’ll go talk to him.”

Gil went inside. He passed the kitchen table, where his cheesecake sat untouched. He walked up the stairs, the same stairs where Austin would ambush Walker when he came home from school, peppering him with foam darts from a toy gun. The door to Austin’s room was open.

Michelle Trenum heard her husband scream.

• • •

On her way to the hospital, Patti McKay made a deal with God. Not Austin. Please. Take me instead. The boy was like a second son. Every summer, the McKay and Trenum families vacationed together at a lake in Maine, where the kids would play King of the Dock—wrestling for control of a wooden swimming platform, tossing one another in the water, Austin always making sure the younger children won their share.

When her cell phone rang, Patti was in her sister’s garden, kneeling in the dirt. It was Cody, panicked. Austin wasn’t breathing. Gil was trying to resuscitate him. An ambulance was on the way. What should they do?

Keep performing CPR, Patti said.

A cardiology nurse, Patti suspected a subdural hematoma. A brain bleed. Which was odd. She had just seen Austin, about 90 minutes earlier, pulling up in her driveway—the top down on his little yellow convertible, Cody in the passenger seat.

Austin had been grinning. He had a gift with him, a Snickers cheesecake.

“Here, Ms. McKay,” he said. “Look what we brought for you.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay.”

“No, really—how are you feeling?”

“I’m fine. My headache is almost gone.”

Patti had been at the game on Friday night, standing with Austin in the Brentsville High parking lot, holding his arm to help him balance. But today his gait was normal, his hands weren’t shaking. She called the emergency room, professional instincts taking over. You’re getting a boy who had a concussion two days ago. You need a  neurosurgeon. If you don’t have one, have a helicopter ready to evacuate. Arriving at Prince William Hospital, she didn’t see a helicopter. She saw Rob Place, the Trenums’ next-door neighbor.

Austin hanged himself, Place said.

• • •

Nothing made sense. Not suicide. Not Austin. Not the boy who went deer hunting in West Virginia with his father and crafted elaborate zombie-apocalypse defense plans with Walker. Not the young man who always said “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” and was adored by his friends’ parents. Not the charmed kid who never got mad on the lacrosse field, who’d scored a goal six seconds into his first high-school game.

“If someone came to me and asked me to rank, 1 to 25, the kids on the team most likely to have problems and the kids who were the most stable, Austin was number one on the stable end of the list,” says Carl Kielbasa, Austin and Cody’s former high-school lacrosse coach. “His maturity level was extremely high. Never experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Almost fatherly to his brothers. Had a wonderful sense of humor. He was a great teammate, very attentive and aware, very patient and kind. A big-time leader on the team and in school—he could hang out with the kids who were partyers and be in an honor-society meeting the next day. Everyone loved him.”

Austin was taken to Inova Fairfax Hospital, where he died at 2 am on Monday. The entire community was stunned. The boy was beloved. Football was beloved. In the Nokesville area, plans were underway to build a new $850,000 youth-football complex; elementary-school students were let out early on Friday afternoons, the better to high-five Brentsville High players as they made their march down the town’s main road.

How could this have happened?

The Trenums went home. Later that day, their phone rang. Laura O’Neal answered. She was Austin’s godmother, one of Michelle’s best friends. She’d been there for Austin’s first birthday, eating cowboy-themed cake; there when he got his first lacrosse stick, which he carried everywhere, like a scepter. Now she would plan his funeral.

There was a man on the line, Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard football player, calling on behalf of scientists at Boston University.

They wanted Austin’s brain.

The human brain is a wondrous thing. It enables us to throw a football, allows us to breathe, think, and love. In its neurons and glial cells, synapses and neurotransmitters, it is essentially who we are.

And who we are is fragile.

Gerard Gioia opens his laptop. On the screen is a video depicting a brain inside a skull. The brain, he explains, is a spongy mass of tissue. Surrounded by fluid, it moves independent of the skull, just slightly, the arrangement providing a protective measure of shock absorption.

“And this,” he says, “is why the helmet will never be the simple answer to this injury.”

Helmets prevent skull fractures but not concussions. Gioia clicks a button. The head rocks back and forth. The brain smashes against the inside of the skull. The screen flashes like a strobe light, a comic-book pow! Such is the basic dynamic of a concussion, an injury that occurs in football with alarming regularity: According to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, 4 percent to 20 percent of high-school and college players will suffer one during a single season. That’s likely a low estimate—some experts believe as many as eight of ten concussions go undiagnosed.

“When the head or the body takes force, the brain moves,” explains Gioia, head of Pediatric Neuropsychology at Children’s National Medical Center and an expert on youth and adolescent sports concussions. “It has a certain threshold, beyond which it stretches and strains.”

Gioia loves football—played it himself in high school and college. He wants to make the sport safer. Three weeks after Austin’s death, he met with Gil and Michelle in his Rockville office, where a New York Giants-themed street sign hangs on the wall. Michelle brought a picture frame containing three photos of Austin, including one of him
joyfully painting his face before a volleyball game the week before his death.

“Look at this boy,” she said, fighting tears. “Look at these pictures. He wasn’t depressed.”

Shock giving way to despair, the Trenums wracked their brains. Was there something we missed? They talked to Austin’s friends, checked his text messages, read the journal he kept for English class: I heard my favorite Sublime song. Today was good. I forgot to wear my Hawaiian shirt. Bummer.

No angst. No suicide note. No sign that anything was wrong. Nothing. The concussion, they figured—it had to be the concussion. But how? Didn’t they go to the ER, keep Austin from strenuous activity, do everything right? Scavongelli, the Brentsville High trainer, had immediately pulled Austin from the game, protecting him from second-impact syndrome, a rare but horrific condition in which athletes suffer a second concussion while recovering from a previous one, causing rapid, catastrophic brain swelling that ends in severe disability or death.

After a concussion during his junior year, Austin was held out of football practice for a week. A medical-hotline operator advised Michelle to watch for signs of depression. She told Austin. He laughed.

Oh, please, Mom.

“Why?” says Michelle. “Why did he do this? We must have said that seven million times.”

• • •

A concussion is not a bruise. It’s a disruption of the intricate system of electrochemical signals that constitute normal brain function. Contrary to widespread belief, concussions don’t always coincide with loss of consciousness. Symptoms include headaches, sensitivity to light, confusion, lack of focus, irritability, and loss of interest in
favorite activities.

With rest and a gradual return to regular activity, most athletes who suffer a single concussion experience no permanent ill effects. Some, however, suffer post-concussion syndrome, in which symptoms persist for months or years, in rare cases permanently. Having one concussion may increase the risk of another. Multiple concussions are
associated with an increased risk of post-concussion syndrome as well as depression and memory loss.

Think of your brain as a computer, Gioia says. The tissue is the hardware, and the electrochemical signals are the software. Concussions can scramble both, disrupting healthy equilibrium. Moreover, they leave the brain drained of energy, like a cell phone with a bad battery.

The best treatment? Rest—lots of it. Waking a sleeping concussion patient every few hours to check for brain bleeding has long been conventional medical wisdom, Gioia says, but actually is not a good idea: You should check on them, but not disrupt their sleep. “The essential aspect is allowing the cells to rebalance themselves. Overworking the brain interferes with that recovery. And it’s not just avoiding additional blows to the head. You can’t be out running. You need good sleep. You have to manage school, any activity that involves a lot of thinking.”

• • •

For 21/2 hours, Gioia and the Trenums talked, going over Austin’s final weekend. As they connected the dots, two things became clear: Football had injured his brain, which subsequently was overworked. Texting. Video games. Driving. Studying. Staying up late. Normal teenage activities. All of them too much.

Looking back over the weekend, they saw warning signs, subtle indicators that something was amiss. Austin had trouble sleeping on Sunday morning. He got lost on the way to Cody’s lacrosse game, even though the directions consisted of a single right turn. He forgot what month it was while fishing with his friend Carmen. He had “football headaches.”

When Austin was concussed a few plays before halftime during a football game his junior year, his teammates were the first to notice. In the locker room, he couldn’t figure out how to work his chin strap and began to bawl. Similarly, his final concussion left him cursing out his best friend, Ryan Hall, for an on-field prank meant to make Austin
laugh.

Gioia showed the Trenums a diagram of the brain. He pointed out the frontal lobes, about one-third of the total brain mass, the portion just behind the forehead, where so much football contact takes place. These gelatinous hunks of meat, he told them, are our executive control centers. They allow us to reason, to choose right from wrong, to override impulses, to connect current actions to future consequences.

In teenagers, the frontal lobes are still developing; in everyone, they require a great amount of energy to function properly. Damage or disrupt them, stretch them like Silly Putty, and concentration suffers. Memory gets spotty. The systems governing emotion and reason are thrown out of whack. You might forget how to work a chin strap; you might consider that unbearably tragic. Nothing makes sense.

Austin’s parents believe that their son may have suffered as many as four concussions during three years of playing football. Did those injuries lead him to take his life? Gioia can’t say. There’s no direct causation. The brain remains mysterious.

“My thought to the Trenums was that Austin’s brain wasn’t functioning properly,” he says. “It was drained in terms of overall energy, unusual emotional response was one of his manifestations, and the argument about academics hit at that time. Bam! Those emotions go off, and now the decision-making is not working properly, either.”

Meeting with the Trenums, Gioia was more succinct. He told them Austin’s case was a perfect storm.

On the first snap of Brentsville’s first football game without

Austin, the school’s quarterback mimed a handoff to his absent fullback, then took a knee. He pointed to the night sky, where cheerleaders with the number 43 painted on their cheeks had released the same number of balloons. The whole school wore white. Cody and Walker wore jerseys bearing their brother’s number, 43, and watched from the sideline. At the end of the game, a Brentsville player carried Walker off the field on his shoulders.

Football went on. The Trenums understood. Gil, 46, had grown up in Ohio and Texas, states where the sport is practically a religion; Michelle, 48, was raised an hour and a half from Odessa, Texas, the real-life setting of Friday Night Lights. She remembers pep rallies and rabid boosters, caravans of cars with shoe-polish-painted windows, what seemed like entire towns turning out for high-school games. Gil and Michelle attended Texas Tech, where Austin went to summer football camp. They loved the sport. So did Cody, a member of the Brentsville High JV squad, and Walker, who played on a youth team.

As the Trenums grieved, friends and neighbors brought them food, mowed and reseeded their lawn, even repainted their front door. The family watched football. Tuesday nights. Thursday nights. All weekend long. College and pro. Tackle after tackle, hit after hit. “I don’t know why,” Gil says. “We just did. It was a distraction, something you had to focus on.”

Gil and Michelle kept in touch with Gioia. They had donated Austin’s brain to the Boston University scientists, who were studying the effects of concussions and head trauma. The Trenums came to a frightening realization: Like so many others around the country, the Prince William County school system wasn’t doing enough to address athletic concussions. What happened to Austin could have happened to anyone.

Six months before Austin’s death, Virginia had passed a law requiring schools to educate students and parents about concussions and to remove students suspected of sustaining the injury from the field of play until cleared by a medical professional. In Fairfax County, education meant watching a ten-minute online video; in Loudoun County, it meant signing a two-page form. Prince William’s policy was still being written, not scheduled to take effect until 2012.

A member of the Prince William County school board, Gil wanted something quicker and better. A policy with teeth. He lobbied administrators. He had Gioia make a presentation to the board, got input from Nowinski, the former Harvard football player now with the Boston University program. Spurred by his son’s death, Gil was
relentless.

Prince William’s new concussion policy went into effect in the summer of 2011, mandating stricter return-to-play guidelines and more thorough education for school athletic trainers. Students trying out for sports are now required to attend an hourlong concussion seminar with at least one parent.

“I have families contacting me all the time, telling me they can’t thank Gil enough,” says Kendra Kielbasa, an advocate for youth-concussion care and the wife of Austin’s former lacrosse coach. Working with Gil to draw up a policy that stresses post-concussion cognitive rest—the kind Austin didn’t know enough to get—Kendra had drawn
on her own experience. Her son, Connor, was concussed after being dropped on his head during a seventh-grade wrestling match. Emergency-room doctors checked Connor for a brain bleed and cleared him to return to school the next day. Three weeks later, with his grades plummeting and his emotions off kilter, he asked his mother if he could lie down.

“Sure,” Kendra said. “Why don’t you go to your room?”

Connor looked around the living room. “I don’t know where it is,” he said. “Can you take me?”

“The hardest part is that people don’t understand—your child looks like he is fine, but he’s not,” Kendra says. “People have to understand that it’s not just a bad headache for a day or two. And it’s not enough to do [concussion education] in the high schools. We have to bring it to the middle and elementary schools.”

Would more education have saved Austin’s life? The Trenums think so.

Last fall, Cody played in a lacrosse tournament in Williamsburg. Michelle was in the stands. A boy from another team was hit hard and concussed. As his parents pulled him off the field, a woman approached. She said she was a nurse. Michelle could overhear their conversation. The boy was dazed, struggling to remember things.

“Well, he’s not passed out,” said the nurse. “That’s a good sign.”

Actually, Michelle thought, episodic amnesia is more of an indicator of serious problems than passing out is.

The nurse continued to offer medical advice, much of it dated. Michelle began to panic. As soon as the nurse left, she ran over to the parents. “Take your son to a doctor,” she implored. “A neurologist. Get him some rest. Keep a close eye on him.”

The parents asked, “Are you a doctor?”

“No,” Michelle said. “But my son died last year after a concussion.”

“That scared them,” she says. “And all I could think was ‘At least your son will live.’ ”

• • •

The brains come here, to a red-brick building in suburban Boston. Each is weighed, photographed, and examined for signs of trauma and disease, then carefully sliced in half. One half goes to the upstairs laboratory, where scientists create tissue samples ten microns thin, chemically stained and mounted on slides for microscopic inspection. The other half is placed in a closet-size, stainless-steel freezer, preserved for future study.

“There are more freezers,” says Victor Alvarez, a researcher at the lab. “We’re always looking for more space.”

Football has a problem. The sport kills too many players. Some slowly, some all at once. The evidence is in the freezers and in the stacks of slides cluttering the office of Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and codirector of the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

Each brain tells a story: former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Justin Strzelczyk, dead at age 36 after leading police on a high-speed chase that began with hallucinations and ended in a fireball; former college-football player Mike Borich, dead at 42 from a drug overdose; former Philadelphia Eagles safety Andre Waters, dead at 44 from shooting
himself; former NFL safety Dave Duerson, dead at 50 from shooting himself in the chest—specifically in the chest—after scrawling a note to his family asking that his brain be donated to science.

Austin Trenum, dead at 17.

Last summer, Gil and Michelle came to McKee’s office. They looked at slides of Austin’s brain. Through the microscope, they saw axons, the long, slender fibers that connect nerve cells and conduct electricity in the brain. In a healthy person, axons run together like fiber-optic cable, straight and smooth. Austin’s were twisted, bulbous,
broken. In scientific language, it was a multifocal axonal injury; in layman’s terms, the equivalent of frayed automobile wiring. Turn on the radio and the windshield wipers might move; turn off the lights and the whole car might shut down.

Michelle choked up. This, she thought, is my baby. This is what ended his life.

Austin’s case isn’t unique, McKee says. There have been other sudden, inexplicable suicides following concussions—some in the military, some among high-school football players. Scientists are struggling to understand the connection. But something is happening. Something terrible.

“It’s the same pattern,” McKee says. “They have disordered thinking and electrical impulses in the brain. They have a minor irritation. And they just want to end it. It’s like having a fly in your room and deciding to blow up your house.”

• • •

A decade ago, McKee wasn’t studying dead football players. Nobody was. That changed when Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist and neuropathologist, examined the brains of former Steelers linemen Mike Webster in 2002 and Terry Long in 2005. Both had suffered slow, puzzling descents into erratic behavior and madness, with Long ultimately killing himself by drinking antifreeze and Webster dying of heart failure after an extended period of living in his truck in which he sometimes shot himself with a Taser gun in order to sleep and other times sniffed ammonia to stay awake.

Omalu found that each had suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive neurodegenerative disease similar to Alzheimer’s and linked to the absorption of repeated blows to the head, a condition previously associated with prizefighters—in layman’s terms, “punch drunkenness.”

Evidence suggests that CTE is caused not only by concussions but also by subconcussive trauma. Little hits—the ones inherent in football that occur on every snap, like the 1,000 to 1,500 hits to the head that Boston University researchers estimate the average high-school lineman takes each season, some at forces equivalent to or greater than a 25-mile-an-hour car crash.

CTE has been found in a number of deceased football players, including Strzelczyk, Creekmur, Borich, Waters, Duerson, and Chris Henry, a former NFL receiver never diagnosed with a concussion. Early stages of the disease also were discovered in the brain of Owen Thomas, a 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania football captain who hanged himself, and in Nathan Stiles, a 17-year-old high-school player from Kansas who collapsed during a game and died of a rebleed of a brain injury suffered in a previous game.

Because their brains are still developing, children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to brain trauma. A recent Virginia Tech study measuring head impacts among seven- and eight-year-old football players found that some hits generated more than 80 g’s of force, equal to the blows delivered in college football.

“I think that in ten years we’re going to look back at this and say, ‘Whoa,’ ” says McKee, who has examined thousands of brains over 26 years. “The public only knows some of the evidence. It’s overwhelming. And as it accumulates, it’s impossible to deny.”

• • •

Austin Trenum showed no signs of CTE, none of the telltale clusters of dark brown spots on slides of stained pinkish brain tissue.

The sport damaged his brain nonetheless.

At a 2009 congressional hearing, Ann McKee presented a summary of her work, acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of former football players seem perfectly healthy. She then asked: Do we expect that 100 percent of cigarette smokers will develop lung cancer? Do we expect 100 percent of children who play with matches or even chainsaws will get hurt?

Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, said that parents and players already know football is dangerous. He said government involvement would mean “the end of football as we know it” because the sport would end up becoming “touch football.”

Such are the terms of an ongoing national debate over football’s safety and long-term viability, an argument that has intensified since the May suicide of popular former NFL linebacker Junior Seau. Mismanaged concussions can cause permanent harm and death. But even players who never have a concussion are at risk of developing CTE. How much is too much?

McKee is no abolitionist. She grew up in Wisconsin rooting for the Green Bay Packers. Her favorite player was Willie Wood, a DC native now suffering from dementia. Her two older brothers played the game. She doesn’t want to end football; she wants to save the sport from itself. Three years ago, she ran into a group of players from her daughter’s high school at a doughnut shop outside Boston.

“So,” McKee asked, “you guys know anything about concussions?”

“Oh, yeah,” said one of the boys. “I’ve had five.”

“I’ve had seven,” said another.

“It was a badge of honor,” McKee recalls.

For years, McKee loved attending prep football games. Not anymore, she says. You just don’t know what will happen.

The room remains as it was. A lacrosse helmet. An SAT prep book. A half-empty pack of gum. All on a desk. Austin and his friends mugging in a photo booth, young and happy and full of life, the snapshots tacked to a mirror. Clothes are piled on the closet floor, the bed unmade. Sometimes Michelle will come upstairs and lie down, just to feel her son’s blanket.

Downstairs is a bathroom. When Austin was in the hospital, doctors working to save his life, Michelle tried to make a deal with God: I’ll rip out the bathroom, make it bigger. Austin can be a vegetable and we’ll take care of him. Just let him live.

“But I knew,” she says, her voice trailing off.

The first months were the hardest. Gil, a senior engineer at SAIC, went back to work. The boys were in school. Michelle, a stay-at-home mom, would lie on the living-room couch—the family’s golden retriever, Biscuit, at her feet—and sob. Before Austin’s death, she had been outgoing, involved in the community, digging up local land-use records and political-campaign contributions to lead a successful fight against a planned rock quarry. Not anymore.

She withdrew, felt vulnerable, couldn’t be around people who didn’t know Austin. She threw herself into spy novels, then science fiction, sometimes reading for seven hours a day. She had once favored Anne Tyler and Pat Conroy, selections from Oprah’s book club. “But I couldn’t read those,” Michelle says. “Nothing with mothers and kids and emotions.”

When children take their lives, parents blame themselves. Michelle wondered why she’d gotten on Austin about his homework; Gil wondered why he’d let him do homework in the first place. A grief counselor told Michelle it would take a year for the guilt to pass. “Even I have trouble sleeping sometimes,” says Patti McKay, the Trenums’ close friend. “I think about what Gil and Michelle saw. I don’t know how they sleep. I can’t imagine living with that.”

Michelle still watched football, but not in the same way. She winced at every big hit, noticed that concussed players almost always fell with their forearms extended away from their bodies, a reflex scientists call “the fencing response.” She began investigating sports concussions and teen suicide, spending hours online, reaching out to military and academic experts.

Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked suicides, but they didn’t correlate those deaths with recent brain trauma, never mind athletic participation. Nor did anyone else.

Michelle befriended Dustin Fink, an Illinois-based athletic trainer who runs a concussion blog. Fink’s anecdotal evidence suggested that boys who played both linebacker and running back were at greater brain-trauma risk. Michelle made a spreadsheet, one she still maintains, logging every instance she could find of high-school and college football players killing themselves: name, age, position played. She saw a pattern. Linebacker. Running back. Linebacker. Running back. Just like Austin.

• • •

Two football helmets rest on a table. One is black, matte and battered, with an orange mouthpiece wedged in the facemask. The other is reddish and gleaming, decorated with a skull and crossbones and a breast-cancer-awareness sticker. Two gashes run down the front.

The first helmet belonged to Austin. The second belongs to Walker.

Michelle pushes them together. “This,” she says, “is how it happens.”

It’s a Saturday, exactly one year after the weekend of Austin’s death.

Cody finished the previous Brentsville High football season, then quit. He didn’t say why. Walker continued to play for a youth squad, fullback and linebacker, same as Austin. Gil and Michelle didn’t want to overreact, give in to emotion, cocoon their son in bubble wrap. Besides, Austin always took such pride in Walker. The boy loved to hit, so much so that he bragged about it: Mommy, that kid is a baby. He cried, and I didn’t even hit him that hard.

Walker wore a special chin strap, rigged with accelerometers that measured the force of every blow he absorbed. If built-in software deemed any hit powerful enough to cause a head injury, three green LED lights on the chin strap would flash red. While Walker was making a routine block, his head whipped sideways. Red lights. His coach pulled him off the field. Two sideline nurses checked him out. Dizzy and frightened, he cried.

“My head,” he said. “My head.”

The Trenums followed Gioia’s instructions. They made Walker rest. They took him to a Sunday-night bonfire—a memorial for Austin—but didn’t let him run around with his friends. On Monday morning, a neurologist diagnosed Walker with a concussion. Sensitive to light and sound, he was held out of football practice and gym class for a week. One week after that, he was back on the field, Michelle looking on.

“You’re so calm,” one of the other mothers said.

Michelle wasn’t. Watching football on TV was bad enough. This was worse. Also, the chin strap. It was supposed to make things easier, safer. But the lights kept turning red, once when Walker hadn’t even been hit. Michelle made him sit out the entire game. Walker fumed, said he wouldn’t wear the device again. Michelle sent the faulty chin strap back to the manufacturer, got a replacement, then sent that one back, too. More red lights. Was the problem a bad battery? Water leaking into the electronics? Was the problem football?

Michelle wasn’t watching her son. She was watching the lights, waiting for green to go red. She worried about punch-drunk football players, the blows adding up over time—wondered if Walker’s concussion was God’s version of a yellow flag. It was all too much.

Michelle Trenum kept coming back to the same question.

“If you’re that worked up,” she says, “then what are you doing letting your kid out there in the first place?

• • •

Losing a child, Michelle says, is like jumping from one train onto another headed in the opposite direction. In an instant, you’re barreling away from everything you once knew, farther and farther with each second.

Brentsville High has a scholarship in Austin’s name. In their living room, the Trenums keep a large photo of Austin, sweaty and beaming, coming off a football field. On the ceiling above the kitchen table is a spot with his fingerprints, smudged and faded, where he and his brothers once liked to test how high they could jump. “I sometimes think we can never repaint that,” Michelle says. There’s sadness in her eyes—green like Austin’s—and pain.

“I love football,” Gil says. “I loved watching the kids play. But it’s not the same anymore.”

Twelve years ago, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman retired after suffering the tenth concussion of his Hall of Fame career, the result of a vicious hit from Washington Redskins linebacker LaVar Arrington. Aikman since has become a successful broadcaster, a man who owes much to football. After the Super Bowl in February, however, he said that the sport was “at a real crossroads. . . . If I had a ten-year-old boy, I don’t know that I’d be real inclined to encourage him to go play football in light of what we’re learning from head injuries.”

Michelle showed Walker the comment.

“I don’t think I want you to play football,” she said.

He was upset—for a moment.

“Can I play another sport?”

Gil and Michelle are not against football. They don’t judge others. But they’ve made their decision.

“As a mother,” Michelle says, “I’m a lot more relaxed watching basketball.”

Patrick Hruby is a culture writer for the Washington Times and a contributor to ESPN.com and TheAtlantic.com, among others. You can contact him at patrickhruby.net.

This article appears in the August 2012 issue of The Washingtonian.