DETROIT (AP) – Brighton resident Beth Weber has found a way to ease the heartbreak a mother feels when a teenage son disappears without a trace and years later is found homeless in another state.

She and her husband, Jim, head to a Detroit park twice a month to help feed the homeless in honor of the people who fed and clothed their homeless son for 15 years.

“God appointed them to watch over my son, so I get to be the hands and feet that touch some other mother’s son in Detroit” said Weber, who shares her family’s story across the country.

Mental illness took Weber’s son, a former Brighton High School scholar athlete, away from her family in 1998.

Weber lived a mother’s worst nightmare until she someone called her house in 2012 to let her know that her son had been burned in fire out west and was in a coma on a respirator in a hospital burn unit.

Her son recovered with his parents at his side, but the mental illness had already taken its toll, Weber said, and he went back to his life as a homeless person.

“We had to relinquish him once again,” she told the Livingston Daily Press & Argus. “He now lives as a homeless man in the woods by himself.”

The Webers now serve hamburgers, fresh fruit, bread, casseroles, salads, soups and other food to between 100 and 400 homeless men and women on the first and fourth Saturdays of every month.

They planned to be at same park again on a recent weekend with members of their Novi church and volunteers of Elevate Detroit, a nonprofit group that feeds the homeless.

Beth Weber and the other volunteers make sure each homeless person wears a name tag.

“The homeless have become faceless in our society,” she said. “We look them in the eye and call them by name.”