Something was wrong. He could sense it.

The feeling had been stalking him for months. The lights were off in his bedroom, and the darkness closed in on him.

Isaiah Renfro, a top freshman wide receiver at the University of Washington, was at his home in South Los Angeles. He had to leave in the morning for spring practice, which was about to start in Seattle. But he could tell: Another storm was coming, a gale of anxiety and depression.

He slammed his suitcase shut and stood near his bed, steeling for a struggle that he was never sure he could win. He breathed hard, and tried to stay on his feet. Now the tempest was upon him. All the pressure. The worries. Football. Family. The feeling that he could never measure up.

He saw only one way out.

He went to the kitchen, careful not to wake his mother or little sister. From the refrigerator, he took a bottle of vodka. In a medicine cabinet, he found some Dilaudid, a powerful opioid painkiller he had used after an injury. He poured the pills into one hand. With the other he drank the vodka. He washed down one pill after another, pill after pill after pill.