KOREATOWN, Calif. — It’s natural to want to help the less fortunate. But few have gone as far as Kim Hershman.

After reading about Shawn Pleasants, a fellow Yale graduate who ended up homeless on the streets of Los Angeles, Hershman did something truly remarkable.  

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"I started crying and then I stopped and I said 'I needed to find this person,'” Hershman told Spectrum News 1. 

The idea that someone who graduated a year behind her could end up homeless, she said, hit close to home. 

“There but for the grace of God go so many of us,” she added.

So, Hershman headed straight to Koreatown’s homeless encampment looking for him. And whaddya know? She found him.

Originally from San Antonio, Texas, Pleasants’ future seemed bright. He graduated from Yale, then worked on Wall Street. By all accounts life was going well… until it wasn’t.

His business failed. Then his mom died and Pleasants ended up on the streets, addicted to meth.

Pleasants had been living on the streets for a decade when a CNN reporter interviewed him about homelessness. The story caught the eye of a fellow Yalie, who wouldn’t take no for answer. 

"I just sat down and crossed my legs on the ground and that was it,” Hershman recalled. 

Life on the streets has taught Pleasants and his husband David Mariscal to be wary of strangers. But there was something about Hershman that made them open up. 

"She did something that no one else did,” Pleasants said. “Instead of just offering me things she asked me what I wanted."

It took three weeks for Hershman to finally convince Pleasants and Mariscal to ditch the sidewalk for her guest house in La Cañada 

Since then, they’ve been navigating the complicated maze of government bureaucracy. 

Hershman helped Pleasants get into rehab. Now they’re working on finding him and his husband a Section 8 apartment. It’s taken so much of her time, Hershman said she had to put her job as a Hollywood attorney on hold. 

“In order to do it successfully I had to stop working with clients,” she said. 

From the beginning, Hershman has been chronicling the experience in the hopes of educating city officials on how to fix what she calls a “broken system.”

“There is no accountably,” she said. “There’s no training, there is no timeline. It’s not just throwing them some place and then leaving them and then they’re setting up encampments in their apartment... We need to get them back to whole and healthy.”

For Pleasants, it’s been a second chance he thought he’d never have.

“Thank God he stepped in and brought an angel my way, brought someone to help me and guided and illuminated,” he said choking back tears. “Sometimes you need someone to hold your hand.”