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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.

On her way home to Durham from college at Virginia Tech, she had driven past Greensboro countless times. But now that she finally knew where her father was, he was gone again. The last reported sightings of him were two weeks ago, first walking along I-85 in Durham, later on N.C. 220 south of Greensboro.

"All these people had a relationship with him, and I never even knew him," Bono said in a phone interview after reading a May 30 column about Hoffmann's sudden departure.

"On a selfish level, it makes me upset. And it makes me so sad that he's trying to make his way somewhere."

Though Hoffmann does not currently wear glasses, his daughter said his vision is extremely poor, and that his ex-wife had described him as "legally blind." His mental illness was diagnosed in 1988, and after four years of marriage, the couple divorced.

Cut to Greensboro, Easter Sunday, 2001, when Hoffmann showed up at the closest church to the park bench - Centenary United Methodist. The church and its members became a refuge for Hoffmann, who missed only two Sundays in seven years before leaving with no explanation in mid-May. The last person to see him at Friendly was a cashier at the nearby BP station, where he bought a map of the eastern U.S.

Believed to suffer from schizophrenia, Hoffmann seemed a bundle of contradictions.

He was shy and extremely reserved, but chose one of the busiest intersections in town as his place.

He never panhandled or asked for help in any way, but accepted what was given to him by an ever-widening circle of people in the neighborhood.

The biggest paradox? Despite being mentally ill and refusing medication, he functioned well enough that he stayed clear of the jail or the hospital, and used neither alcohol nor drugs, not even cigarettes.

"He was having running conversations with people you couldn't see," observed Mitch McGee, a veteran street outreach worker with Family Service of the Piedmont, "but not so much that he would break the rules. That's amazing."

Ironically, Hoffmann's ability to live by society's rules prevented direct intervention. In other words, the law says that mentally ill people must be a "danger to themselves or others" in order to be committed or medicated against their will, and so Hoffmann had every right to refuse medication or mental health services.

That didn't stop an unusual range of people in Greensboro from trying to help. A committee at Centenary formed to see to his needs. Merchants at Friendly checked on him, as did police officers. Workers from the office buildings near the greenway brought him a tree at Christmas.

On cold days, neighbors rented him a room where he could shower and watch college football.

"He was the true face of homelessness. I think that's why he touched so many people: " said Gail Haworth of the Servant Center. "Most true homeless are disabled - especially mentally. They don't hold up a sign."

But as Haworth found in several attempts to bring Hoffmann in off the street and get him housing, his illness prevented people from getting too close. He refused to apply for disability, maintaining that nothing was wrong with him. He also declined Haworth's plan to place him in a small house - even when she offered to buy the park bench from the city and move it with him.

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."

From that standpoint, both outreach workers and those who befriended Hoffmann are wondering how this story could have ended differently, before he left in May, evidently feeling encroached upon by other homeless people in the area.

At Centenary, Lindy Hutchison saw potential in Hoffmann, a man who always held the door for her, always made the sign of the cross and knelt in prayer, leading the Methodists to surmise - correctly, his daughter confirmed - that he was brought up Catholic.

The church members also learned, the hard way, never to give Hoffmann pocket money before the collection plate was passed. If they did, he would simply put it in the plate.

At Servant Center, Haworth could not help imagining the possibilities, had Hoffmann agreed to take medication to silence the voices and quell the hallucinations.

"He could be a functioning father, a grandfather," she said. "He could hold a job."

Instead, he was the most visible homeless person in Greensboro, a reminder of a question so plain that every child in the back seat of every car passing by could pose it.

Why was that man always there?

The answer wasn't so plain.

"You could look at it as, we didn't mind him being on that bench, and that it was acceptable to be homeless," McGee said, "or that we were nice to never kick him off the bench, at an intersection that's rather high-dollar real estate. It's a puzzle. I just hope we didn't sell him short."

As for Kimberly Bono, who gave birth to her first child four weeks ago, the riddle is where Mark Hoffmann has gone, and how to find him.

"I think about him more now, every day. Now that I have my own daughter, it's more poignant for me now," Bono said, thinking back on graduations her father missed, her wedding, and now a grandchild.

"The whole anger and bitterness thing kind of blew over. I just want to see him again."

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 336-373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com