"Mission Local readers first met Church in 2019. It was a redemptive tale of a woman who had spiraled into the darkest corners hidden in plain sight in San Francisco. An underaged sex worker walking the streets at 14. An alcoholic paying for three-dollar bottles of vodka with small change. A heroin addict. A barefoot homeless woman washing her hair in the gutter. A " High User of Multiple Services " with a rap sheet six pages long."
""There was a time several years ago," Officer Robert Rueca of the San Francisco Police Department told us in 2019, "that there wouldn't be a day we didn't contact Rachel at some level of hardship. When she was intoxicated, if she was not able to take care of herself, we'd take her in and release her when she was sober. That happened countless times. And, a number of times, she was arrested. I myself arrested her in October of 2013.""
Rachel Church is a fortysomething San Francisco mother who commutes by ebike while listening to Charles Bukowski audiobooks. She entered sex work at 14, struggled with alcoholism and heroin addiction, lived homeless and was a frequent contact for police, accumulating a six-page rap sheet. Repeated arrests, jail stays, rehabs, and sustained social-work support eventually led to recovery. Church is eight years sober, earned a college degree, lives independently with her grade-school daughter, and has returned to the workforce. Despite stability and positive relationships, her past trauma tempers expectations of a stereotypical happily ever after.
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