Every now and then, as Nora Reiter drives by Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church, she'll lower her car window and ask Mark Hoffmann whether he wants some dinner.

She knows to find the 51-year-old, homeless man sitting on a bench outside the Frederick Road church, reading a newspaper or gazing at the passing traffic.

Often, he accepts her offer of food and always politely.

"I know he likes beef better than fish," said Reiter, who typically drives to the nearest fast-food chain restaurant, buys a hamburger and delivers it to Hoffmann.

"Please don't make it sound like I'm a saint," she said, agreeing to be interviewed for the Times. "All of our parishioners are being charitable toward him."

A pastoral associate and business manager at St. Mark Catholic Church on Melvin Avenue, Reiter first encountered Hoffmann in June after he began taking Holy Communion at St. Mark.

By coincidence, a Greensboro, N.C., resident familiar with Hoffmann's disappearance from that city visited Catonsville earlier this month, attended Sunday Mass at St. Mark and recognized him there.

By mid-July, Reiter had learned through his friends in Greensboro, and his 27-year-old daughter, Stroudsburg, Pa., resident Kimberly Bono, that Hoffmann had been missing since May from his seven-year residence on a park bench in the North Carolina city.

"Those people were good to him and made him feel like he was OK," she said, referring to churchgoers, merchants and residents in Greensboro. "I can't imagine how scary it would be to live out on a bench or in the woods. That would terrify me."

No one other than Hoffmann may know why he left Greensboro and caused so many to worry about his whereabouts and welfare.

Nor do they know how he made his way some 350 miles north to Catonsville.

He declined an interview with the Times, saying, "I don't want to make a statement.

"It is very kind of you to ask," Hoffmann said, holding a folded newspaper close to his face.

Bono was on vacation last week and unavailable to comment.

Having pieced together Hoffmann's history from St. Mark records, Greensboro residents and Bono, Reiter says the Catonsville native rarely speaks to anyone, has repeatedly declined housing or social services assistance and probably has a mild form of schizophrenia, including hallucinations.

His parents, Murray and Viola Hoffmann, joined the St. Mark parish in 1954, and the church recorded his birth in March 1957.

The parents lived on Locust Avenue when they died as members, she in 1994, he the following year, Reiter said.

State tax records show they had lived there since 1963, when Mark, the youngest of four children, was 6 years old and starting school at St. Mark.

He remained at the school through the eighth grade, then graduated from Mount St. Joseph High School. He later graduated from Lehigh University and worked for a while as an accountant at Duke University in Durham, N.C., 53 miles east of Greensboro, according to Reiter.

How and why he found his way to a bench in Greensboro seven years ago remains a mystery, as does his reason for leaving.

A regular presence at the church, he rarely misses Mass on weekday or Sunday mornings, Reiter said.

At the Coffee Junction on Frederick Road, owner Donna Quick noted that he comes into the shop almost daily to buy a cup of coffee, which he drinks while sitting on a chair outside the store.

"He tells you what he wants and says 'thank you,' " she said, adding that he always wears a coat and long pants despite the summer heat.

She offered no complaint about his presence there.

"He brings out the best in people," said Reiter, who knows of only one person, a businessman, who had complained of Hoffmann's presence in Catonsville.

"They are losing out on a great opportunity to be charitable," she said. "Mark is a very gentle soul."

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