Killer High: The Series – “Finding Freedom” | Family, Science and Sobriety in the Fentanyl Crisis

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — Watch “Killer High: The Series – Finding Freedom” this Sunday at 6:30pm on ABC30.

The graduation dress was white. Renee Patla had picked it out with her daughter Olivia weeks earlier, the two of them imagining the walk across the stage, the diploma, the wide-open summer ahead. Olivia never wore it to commencement. Her parents buried her in it instead.

Olivia Patla was 18 years old and a single day shy of her Clovis North High School graduation when she died of a fentanyl overdose in 2021. A 17-year-old friend, according to the family and law enforcement sources, let her die – refusing to call 911 and recording video as it happened.

Her story is at the center of “Finding Freedom,” the latest episode of “Killer High: The Series,” a docuseries that tracks the fentanyl epidemic through the lives it shatters and the communities trying to rebuild. The episode braids three narrative threads: a family learning to breathe around an empty chair at the dinner table, researchers racing to rewire the addicted brain, and two men in recovery who built a new kind of meeting room because the old ones wouldn’t let them speak.

The night she left

The last conversation Renee Patla had with her daughter was about drugs. They stood in their home and talked plainly, mother to child, about the risks of drinking, of pills, of the choices that await every teenager walking out the door on a Friday night.

“For the rest of my life, I can see her looking me in the eyes, saying, ‘Mom, I’m not stupid. I would never do that to you or Dad, or to my brothers and my sisters,'” Renee recalls in the episode. “Her exact words were, ‘I don’t want to die.'”

Hours later, Olivia was gone. Renee describes the image she cannot escape: her daughter on a stretcher, hair fallen across her face, eyes barely open. “We died with her that same day,” she says. “To see your daughter on a stretcher – it’s an image you can never get out of your head.”

The Patla family – parents Renee and Paul and siblings Jacob, Abigail and Luke – appears together on camera, seated close, finishing one another’s sentences the way families do when grief has made them fluent in a shared language. Jacob, Olivia’s brother, puts it simply: “We were strong as six and we’re even stronger as five because of that loss.”

Abigail offers a quieter devastation. “As I get older, I start to forget her voice,” she says. “And it’s scary.”

The family has channeled its grief into advocacy, participating in school presentations that project Olivia’s photo on auditorium screens across the country – an irony not lost on her siblings, who note she hated having her picture taken. “Even if these kids don’t listen,” Luke says, “it makes me feel good knowing that these people and my sister aren’t just being forgotten.”

For Renee, the mission is personal and perpetual. “Makes me feel like Olivia is still helping people,” she says. “If saving a life is what my daughter gave her life for – I honestly think she would have been okay with that, because that’s just the type of person she was.”

Rewiring the brain

The episode pivots from the Patla living room to the laboratory, where two researchers are pursuing radically different strategies to break addiction’s grip on the brain.

Dr. Eric Garland, whose work on mindfulness-oriented recovery enhancement, or MORE, has produced striking clinical results, describes addiction as a problem that demands more than willpower. “Addiction is really a hard-to-treat problem,” he says. “We need innovative solutions that can not only address the addictive behavior itself, but also the physical and emotional pain that drives addiction.”

MORE is a mental training program rooted in neuroscience. In clinical trials, Garland says, it has reduced opioid craving by 50 percent, drug relapse by 42 percent and dropout from treatment programs by 59 percent. The episode shows researchers fitting participants with EEG caps to measure brain activity as images of opioids flash across a screen, tracking the neural signatures of craving in real time.

Dan Kruger, a professional motorcycle racer whose career left him with broken wrists, ankles, ribs, a fractured back and five concussions, became one of MORE’s most compelling case studies. He spent more than two decades on daily opioids, stockpiling hundreds of pills in a home safe. After discovering Garland’s work through a podcast, Kruger committed to a slow, deliberate tapering process built around guided meditation. Nine months later, he was completely opioid-free.

“My chronic pain is probably down 20 percent, which may not sound like a lot,” Kruger says. “But you have to keep in mind, I was on crazy amounts of opioids and now I’m on zero.”

At UC San Diego, neuroscientist Dr. Scott Sternson is pursuing a longer-range solution: artificial receptors engineered to bind specifically to addictive drugs and reverse their effects on the brain without dulling the natural reward system. In animal models, rats with the receptors installed in targeted brain regions drastically reduced their cocaine self-administration. The therapy, designed as a last resort for patients with long relapse histories, is likely a decade from human trials.

A room where you can speak

The final act of “Finding Freedom” belongs to Danny and Howie, two men in recovery who met at a sober living house in Fresno and forged a bond that outlasted the program. The episode captures their easy, overlapping rapport – brothers not by blood but by survival.

Danny’s story is a familiar arc made vivid by its specificity. Raised in a stable Fresno home by loving parents, he drifted from weekend drinking in high school to OxyContin, then heroin, then fentanyl – each step a logical escalation in a market that kept shifting beneath him. “I tried OxyContin and it was like, ‘Oh, this is one of the best feelings I’ve ever felt in my life,'” he says. When his father died unexpectedly in 2022, Danny’s last anchor gave way. “I just didn’t care anymore. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t care if I was alive either.”

Howie, who had been managing the sober living facility when Danny arrived, recalls their early dynamic with characteristic understatement. “He was just another dude coming from treatment.” But the connection deepened. After Howie moved out, the two men would talk by phone late into the night, Danny sometimes falling asleep on the line, maintaining the thread that kept both of them tethered.

Together, they identified a gap in the recovery landscape. Traditional 12-step meetings, they found, often resisted frank discussion of fentanyl. “I would want to share what’s inside,” Howie says, “but there’s been many times where they’d stop you from sharing and they say, ‘Well, you can’t speak about that here.'”

Their answer was Fentanyl Anonymous, a judgment-free fellowship open to anyone struggling with any substance. “All we do is promote recovery in these rooms,” Danny says. The episode films a Monday night meeting in Fresno, where members introduce themselves, share their stories without interruption, and celebrate milestones with key tags marking their sobriety. One member, James, tells the room the fellowship saved his life. “There was a time in my life where I didn’t even think that I could get 30 days,” he says, accepting a chip for nine months clean.

Howie and Danny describe Fresno’s recovery community as one of the strongest and most diverse in the country, a distinction they attribute to something ineffable about the Central Valley. “We don’t know what it is,” Danny says, “but there’s something in Fresno that is different than anywhere else.”

“Finding Freedom” does not offer easy resolution. The Patlas still set five places instead of six. Dan Kruger still manages chronic pain. Danny and Howie still answer the phone when it rings late at night. But the episode makes a quiet argument that freedom from fentanyl’s grip is not a single moment of deliverance. It is a daily practice – of grief, of science, of showing up to a room full of strangers and saying your name out loud.

As Renee Patla says, looking into the camera with the steady gaze of a mother who has already survived the worst: “We’re just stronger. We’re stronger because we have Olivia watching over us.”