VIDEO – ALL CAUGHT ON FILM –
Feb. 21, 2026 – The graduation dress was black. René 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.
For the rest of my life, I can see her looking me in the eyes, saying, ‘Mom, I’m not stupid.’ Her exact words were, ‘I don’t want to die.’
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.
