Martin Sheen and Mitch Snyder: The homeless and Martin's children, Charlie and Emilio.

Actor Martin Sheen, who portrayed homeless advocate Mitch Snyder in Samaritan: The Mitch Snyder Story, are together in this interview. As positive as they sound about their progress, four years later Mitch would take his own life. He had suffered set backs in the homeless movement and was despondent over a failed love affair. He hanged himself in his room at his D.C. Shelter.
Martin Sheen slept on a steam grate, in Washington, to feel the pain of the nation's street people. Sheen said Snyder was 'holding a blanket for him' on a grate on the grounds of the Capitol, near a statue Snyder erected of a homeless family.
"It will teach me something I lost touch with, what these people physcially feel on the street,' said Sheen, who played Snyder in a TV movie about the activist's battle to keep his shelter open and to get more federal funding for the homeless.
"I think you can identify with someone much easier if you can feel their pain -- physical, emotional, spiritual -- but you have to try and put yourself in their shoes",' said Sheen, adding he was sleeping on the street "'for himself."
Sheen helped members of Snyder's Community for Creative Non-Violence serve dinner to the homeless on the Capitol grounds.