FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (KFSN) — Fresno County has made major progress in the fight against fentanyl, with overdose deaths dropping to a five-year low.
“We’re at a better place,” District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp said. “We’re improving.”
Data from the DA’s office shows 66 fentanyl deaths in 2025, down 42% from the all-time high of 114 in 2021.
“I think at that time, we just wanted to stop it,” Smittcamp said. “We just wanted to make sure it didn’t increase.”
Behind the overdose numbers are people like Elaine Hudson, who lost her son, Frankie DePrima, to fentanyl six years ago.
“He was your basic 20-year-old kid,” Hudson said.
She showed Action News the pills DePrima got hours before he died. He thought it was Xanax, but one was laced with fentanyl.
“Fentanyl doesn’t (care) if you’re educated, not educated, rich, poor, (or) what neighborhood you live in,” Hudson said.
His death came at the start of the pandemic, as overdoses surged.
The crisis sparked a public awareness campaign, prompting officials to erect billboards across the county.
They put Frankie’s face on one of them.
“I believe that seeing a local face on that billboard had more of an impact,” Hudson said.
“They are faces to individuals that have succumbed to fentanyl overdoses,” Senior Deputy District Attorney Kendall Reynolds said.
Reynolds prosecuted the county’s first fentanyl murder case last year, when a jury agreed that knowingly selling a deadly dose of fentanyl is murder.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that this conviction has had an effect on the decreasing numbers,” Reynolds said. “We could never prove it. It’s certainly anecdotal, but it means something in this community.”
The conviction led to a new phase of the campaign, shifting from warnings about fentanyl to consequences.
The message even reached the courtroom, where the judge referenced it during sentencing.
“He made a comment that everybody, pretty much, in the courtroom had seen the billboards,” Reynolds said. “It saturated Fresno County.”
Work on the second fentanyl murder case is already underway, and Smittcamp says she is motivated to reach zero overdose deaths.
“We can’t take our foot off the pedal,” Smittcamp said. “We can’t just say, ‘Oh, well, hey, great, we’re down 42 percent.’ We just have to keep grinding, and we have to keep pushing.”
By ABC30’s Gabe Ferris
