Sunday, Jun. 15, 2008 3:00 am
To thousands of motorists passing by him daily at Friendly Center, he was a street person on a bench, a man who appeared one day in 2001 and left just as abruptly in mid-May.
To Kimberly Bono, however, Mark Hoffmann is more than that. He is her father, and the last time she saw him was in 1989. She was 8.
"He was taking us back to my mom's house, and he was crying," Bono, 27, recalled of Hoffmann's last joint-custody visit with her and two younger sisters. "I don't know if he left for noble reasons, or if he realized the mental illness was taking over. I never saw him again, and all this time, I wondered what happened to him."
Bono, a technical writer who lives in Stroudsburg, Pa., with a husband and newborn daughter, said she was therefore "flabbergasted" when a relative back in North Carolina recently sent her a News & Record story.
The details matched what she knew about her father, now 51 — his date of birth, the spelling of his name, the fact that he graduated from Lehigh University and had been an accountant at Duke. All doubt was removed when Bono sent family photographs.
Though the man in the pictures looks more than 20 years younger — especially without the raw, weathered look of seven winters and summers outdoors — he has the same strawberry-blond hair and bright blue eyes.
The revelation that her father had been in plain sight for so many years, just an hour from where she grew up, held mixed emotions for Bono.
Was he, then, homeless "by choice"?
"Choice denotes rational thought," said McGee, who shares Haworth's concern for the potential danger and the physical toll chronic homelessness has taken on Hoffmann. "It's already telling. Look how old he looks already."
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http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?
AID=/20080615/NRSTAFF/817984475/-1/news1802
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