"I don't think he felt he was creative enough," Erich Bergendorff said. "He really felt he had to work hard ... to keep up the standards that he had which were really quite high."

Friends and family members say Bergendorff was deeply saddened by the Jan. 27 death of his older brother, Fred, who had struggled with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Bergendorff was concerned he couldn't afford to travel from Las Vegas to Southern California for his brother's memorial service, family members said. He posted a Jan. 29 message online describing Fred Bergendorff as "the best brother you could have."

Roger Bergendorff also worried about his dog, Angel, who at 13 years old suffered health problems and needed eye drops four times a day, Erich Bergendorff said.

"Whatever he went to the hospital for, it was not suicide," Erich Bergendorff said. "There might have been an accident. He was very depressed about losing his brother and having financial difficulties and losing his job."

Family members didn't know until Feb. 21 that Roger Bergendorff was hospitalized. They reached a motel manager, who found the dog and two cats in Bergendorff's room and turned them over to the Humane Society.

With eviction looming, a motel employee went to the room again Feb. 26 and found guns in the room, police said. The employee contacted authorities, who retrieved the guns and William Powell's "cookbook" on how to assemble homemade bombs, marked at a section on ricin, Las Vegas police said.

Police found no ricin and tested the air but found no contamination. They have not said what weapons were found.

Two days later, as cousin Thomas Tholen was collecting Bergendorff's belongings from the room, he turned over a plastic bag containing several vials of what turned out to be ricin powder to the motel manager. Authorities said castor beans, from which the ricin toxin is derived, also were found in Bergendorff's room.

Police and the FBI quickly denied any terrorism link but have not explained why. Officials said Bergendorff could face state charges of possession of a controlled substance or more serious federal charges of possession and manufacture of ricin.

Ricin has no antidote and can be lethal in amounts as small as the head of a pin. It prevents the body from synthesizing proteins and shuts down vital organs such as the liver, kidneys and heart.

"If you breathe it in, it would spread very rapidly through the bloodstream," said Andrew Ternay Jr., founder of the Rocky Mountain Center for Homeland Defense at the University of Denver.

"It's not the kind of stuff you use for anything except for poison," added Ternay, author of "The Language of Nightmares," a glossary of terms for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

The only legal use for ricin is cancer research.