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A great Samaritan

• Helping people off streets starts with cookies, continues with love

By ERIC BARTELS

The Portland Tribune, Aug 14, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (21 Reader comments)

Sarah Modrall, with some of the street kids she’s reached out to in Pioneer Courthouse Square and elsewhere in downtown, has devoted eight years to helping people off the streets, often sheltering them in her own home.

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Sarah Modrall had seen Sean Shearon around, but the two didn’t officially meet until he overdosed on heroin one night in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

It was Modrall who drove Shearon to the hospital, something he’s not sure anyone else would have done.

“Everyone around me would’ve been, like, ‘It’s just another drug addict,’ ” he says.

To Modrall, a middle-aged mom from Southeast Portland, there’s no such thing as just another drug addict. Or just another kid. Or, most important, just another kid who lives on the street.

For the past eight years, Modrall, better known to many as the Cookie Lady, has devoted her life to them.

“She believes that there’s hope for everybody, and there is,” says Shearon, who is now sober, working and off the street. “If it wasn’t for her, I’d probably be in jail. Or dead.”

It wasn’t just dumb luck that Modrall was around when she was needed. She’s around a lot. If downtown kids aren’t familiar with her, Shearon says, “they’re usually pretty new.”

Approached near the Skidmore Fountain recently, a half-dozen black-clad youths – lounging in the afternoon shade – overcame their suspicion of a stranger long enough to acknowledge that they knew her.

“She’s the nicest lady in the world,” said a dark-haired kid using his backpack as a pillow.

Modrall’s kindness, which was first distributed along with bags of homemade cookies, became a key ingredient in a charitable effort that now includes a well-staffed outreach center, partnerships with social service agencies and three Portland-area homes – including her own – that house street kids in transition.

What’s surprising is just how unlikely a candidate she might seem for the role she’s chosen. A pretty, Texas-born minister’s daughter whose own children are grown, she wouldn’t be out of place at the country club or relaxing at a vacation home somewhere.

But she found herself called to the rough, seemingly asocial youths who are an indelible part of the downtown landscape, the ones who inspire reactions ranging from pity to annoyance to outright fear.

Some call them “gutter punks.” Modrall sees them differently.

“One day I saw all these kids hanging out, and my heart went out to them,” she says. “I thought ‘Why isn’t anybody helping them?’ ”

Modrall’s experience with troubled kids goes back a ways. She took in foster children for years, worked in special education and raised an adopted daughter whose behavior contributed to the breakup of a long marriage.

She was cleaning houses for a living when she began handing out cookies to homeless kids downtown – a population estimated to be in the hundreds.

“I told them, ‘I’m a mom, and I care about you,’ and they smiled back at me,” she says. “From that point on, I went downtown every week, twice a week. I didn’t try to talk to anybody, I just let them know I was there.”

Shearon, whose deepening addiction would eventually bring him into Modrall’s embrace, observed her from a distance.

“I had seen her around, but I was just so caught up in what I was doing, I didn’t really look for outreach,” he says. “She would sit down there and wait people out. A lot of times, the kids would come to her.”

Over time, Modrall became convinced that removing street kids from their environment, one that often included prostitution and other crimes in addition to drug and alcohol abuse, was the only sure way to save them.

As she’d been doing for years as a foster parent, Modrall began to open her home to homeless kids, and she wasn’t taking any shortcuts.

“I said, ‘I want the most difficult ones. I want the ones that are totally impossible.’ And that’s what I have.”

Modrall figures that reaching the street’s hardest cases means she can send them back out as agents of change.

“I want them to be able to go back to the streets and give hope to people down there,” she says. “Where they can say, ‘He’s made a lot of changes. He’s done very well.’ ”

“That’s a Christian notion,” says John Rector, who has worked alongside Modrall mentoring kids. “God’ll take the ones that nobody wants and turn them around.”