AUSTIN (AP) - A jury awarded about $1 million to a Round Rock couple whose son died after taking an energy booster called Ripped Fuel, but found the 24-year-old was half to blame for his own death.

The initial award of $2,014,000 to Charles and Cora Scurlock was cut in half. Their son, Charles Bryant Scurlock II, died in 1999 a few hours after collapsing while taking an Army National Guard physical fitness test.

The couple's Austin lawyer, Mike Grimes, said on Friday that the Scurlock's got more of what they wanted when the jury also decided that Ripped Fuel's design formulation -- including a combination of caffeine and the stimulant ephedrine -- was unreasonably dangerous.

"It's a good verdict," he said. "I wish we could have hit them harder. But the finding of danger was really what the Scurlocks wanted to accomplish."

Cora Scurlock said her and her husband's main aim was "to try to prevent this from happening to anyone else's son," the Austin American-Statesman reported Saturday.

Grimes said the finding of unreasonable danger would make it easier for the loved ones of any other victims to win lawsuits against Ripped Fuel's manufacturer, Twinlab Corp. of Hauppauge, N.Y.

The company will appeal the verdict, said Ohio lawyer Joe Thomas, who represented it during the three-week trial.

The company's main defense was that "an overwhelming body of scientific evidence supports the safety of products containing ephedrine and caffeine," Thomas said.

The plaintiffs fought the assertion of safety with expert witnesses and evidence such as the American Medical Association's finding last October that the health risk/benefit ratio of ephedrine-laced products was unacceptable and that they should be banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Ephedrine has been banned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Football League.

Officials are investigating the possible role of ephedrine in the Monday death of Baltimore Oriole pitcher Steve Bechler after a workout.

For several years in the 1990s, the Texas Department of Health fought the makers of a variety of ephedrine-containing products, over-the-counter energy boosters and diet aids after reports of at least eight Texas deaths and more than 1,200 health problems ranging from seizures to heart attacks.

The death of Charles Scurlock II was complicated because he carried the genetic trait for sickle cell disease.

Part of Twinlab's defense was that when Scurlock died a few hours after collapsing while taking an Army National Guard physical fitness test at Bastrop High School, he might have fallen victim to complications from a sickle cell condition, rather than the Ripped Fuel he took beforehand, apparently for extra energy.