He arrived with little more than a few clothes and a blender.
Daryl Burns was a sight to see that fall day in 2007, when he walked into the Bay Area Rescue Mission in Richmond. His hair in dreadlocks down to his waist, a cane to help him walk on a broken leg, his jaw wired shut, the result of a car accident after months of addiction to drugs and alcohol.
The blender made it possible to eat. The rest was still up in the air.
"I wasn't sure which way to go. I was lonely, despondent," he recalls, sitting at the mission on a sunny spring afternoon almost three years later.
Burns' story is not necessarily uncommon. He had a life — several children and a career as a middle school teacher in Oakland. Then his mother died, and the effects from a marriage to an addict took a toll. He became overwhelmed, and an addict himself.
The turning point came when, after being arrested on a drug charge and released, Burns bought a car, drove it without a license, led Oakland police on a high-speed chase, and crashed.
"I couldn't run anymore," he said.
It's difficult to picture this tall, soft-spoken man as an addict. He's neat and buttoned-up, and knows and greets by name every child who walks into the mission's after-school program.