(Photo Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
On a cold, near-freezing morning the day after Christmas last year, Mike O’Reilly walked toward the Salvation Army pantry and found a man passed out in a sleeping bag under the building’s covered walkway.
He woke up Waik Gan and told him he couldn’t sleep there, and the man politely shuffled away. The next day, O’Reilly returned to work and found the same man asleep in the same place.
“I asked him how he’s doing and has he ever thought about entering a drug program and he said, ‘Yeah, I might need that,’ ” O’Reilly recalled during an interview at the Salvation Army Concord Corps, located along Clayton Road.
It was that morning that Gan got sober and started to rebuild his life with the help of the same nonprofit where he sought shelter.