The photograph of Danny Ellerd at 92 pounds is almost impossible to reconcile with the man he is today.
At 5-foot-9, Ellerd looks skeletal, his hair falling across his face and his beard unkempt. He is wearing a filthy Houston Texans tank top. At the time, he was living on the streets, so consumed by addiction that finding drugs had become more urgent than finding food.
Beside that image is another version of Ellerd: his hair neatly combed, his beard trimmed, his shoulders filling out a dark suit.
The photographs, featured on a highway billboard, capture a physical transformation. But they don’t capture what it took to get from one to the other.
Today, Ellerd, 39, is more than five years sober. He is a father, a college graduate and a housing navigator for City Care in Oklahoma, where he helps people experiencing homelessness.
For his father, Mark, 62, the man in the second photograph is still difficult to reconcile with the son he once feared he might lose.
“I just think, in my wildest dreams, I never thought he would be where he is today,” Mark Ellerd tells TODAY.com. “He’s far exceeded my dreams for his life.”
The Path to Addiction, Homelessness
As a boy, Danny says he struggled at school and was bullied for being quiet and small.
By 10th grade, he was using marijuana.
“It kind of just took away all the feelings I had about feeling different and numbed everything,” Danny recalls.
After shoulder surgery around 2008 or 2009, Ellerd was prescribed Dilaudid, an opioid painkiller, and oxycodone. When the prescriptions ended, he began finding pills elsewhere.
For years, he was able to hold down a job while keeping his addiction largely hidden.
Eventually, though, his life unraveled.
Around 2018 or 2019, Danny became homeless. For roughly three years, he slept outside businesses and in tents tucked into secluded parts of parks and beneath bridges.
His addiction had become so severe that going four to six hours without drugs could leave him violently ill from withdrawal. Getting something to eat could wait. Getting drugs could not.
His weight fell to 92 pounds.
He overdosed multiple times and struggled to manage his diabetes. He panhandled for money and, at times, stole from stores and traded what he took for drugs.
His parents tried repeatedly to help him. But eventually, Danny could no longer stay at home.
It wasn’t because they had stopped loving him. They simply could no longer trust what the addiction had made him capable of.
“I burned that bridge down with them,” Danny says.
Still, Mark kept looking for his son.
He knew roughly where Danny was living on the streets and would drive through the area, hoping to find him alive. One day, he spotted Danny standing on a corner about a mile from where he worked.
Mark pulled over and motioned for him to come to the parking lot. He gave him some money.
And then, he says, he wanted to put his son in the car and take him home.
“I wanted to put him in the trunk with me and take him home,” Mark says. His voice breaks. He pauses before gathering himself and continuing.
But they had tried bringing Danny home before. He was still using, and Mark knew he couldn’t keep doing it.
So he drove away.
A Decision That Changed Everything
By then, two bounty hunters were searching for Danny after he failed to appear in court. Mark knew where his son was.
He told them.
It was a decision no parent would want to make. But Mark believed Danny was safer in jail than he was on the streets.
“I knew that on the streets, I mean, he’s got no food. He’s got access to drugs,” Mark says. “He’s going to have food, and he’s not going to have access to drugs in jail. So I’m thinking, my thoughts are that this is the better of the two.”
The bounty hunters found Danny.
They took him to jail, but when they saw how sick he was, a nurse refused to admit him and told them to take him to the emergency room.
Danny was 92 pounds. His diabetes was out of control. He had an infection in his arm that his father says doctors feared could spread into his bloodstream. They worried he might ultimately need an amputation.
What he saw was a man so sick that, for the first time, the possibility of losing Danny felt immediate.
His son had come as close to death as Mark had ever seen.
“A father’s not supposed to watch his son die like this,” Mark told him.
For Danny, seeing his father cry became the moment he understood that he could not continue as he had been.
“I just I’m not gonna make it,” he remembers thinking. “This will be the end.”
Discovering Purpose, Passion and Fatherhood
He spent about a month in the hospital, undergoing surgery and recovering. When he was released, his parents knew he couldn’t simply return to the life he had been living.
They helped connect him with a sober-living program that provided structure, accountability and a community built around recovery.
This time, something stuck.
For the first time in years, Danny wasn’t simply trying to make it through the next few hours. He was beginning to imagine a life beyond them.
At one of his recovery meetings, a man spoke about a program at Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City for people who had experienced homelessness and addiction. Danny applied and was accepted.
He earned straight A’s and received a two-year leadership scholarship that paid for almost his entire college education. He eventually earned degrees in computer information systems and enterprise development and took classes in nonprofit management.
Danny works as a housing navigator, helping people experiencing homelessness.
For Danny, returning to the places and people that remind him of his old life has become part of protecting the new one he has built.
“When I go back and I help people, it reminds me of where I came from,” he says. “I think that connection of going back and helping others keeps me on the straight path.”
Danny is newly married. He and his wife have a 10-month-old son, Benjamin.
His parents were at their Sept. 7 wedding. His mother helped with the decorations. His father helped with the food.
For Mark, seeing his son become a husband and father is almost surreal.
Five years ago, a future like this was almost impossible to imagine. Today, Danny is building the kind of life he once wasn’t sure he would live long enough to see: a wife, a son, a career and a chance to help people who are still where he once was.
Danny celebrated five years of sobriety on Sept. 4.
“I remember laying in my tent and I was probably about dead, saying, ‘If I had one more chance, I would do it right.’ And I got that chance and I did.”
