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It had grown viciously cold, and the supply of scraps he might have gathered from trash cans had slowed to nearly nothing as folks moved inside to stay warm.

But he had no place in which to move inside. He had been homeless for 15 years, scrounging across the Southwestern states, adrift from family in Mexico by whatever had broken him and brought him to such a wretched life.

He looked to be in his 50s, a large man with a scruffy beard who kept his head bowed as if he was trying to move unnoticed.

Metro Court Judge Victoria Grant remembers his name was Mr. Gutierrez, no first name that she can recall. Because he wore so many layers of coats and shirts, she could not tell just how thin he was.

Mr. Gutierrez came before Grant, who runs the Metro Court Homeless Court, last month to be arraigned on criminal trespassing charges for sleeping in the stacks at the University of New Mexico's Zimmerman Library, his second time being caught there.

He had wanted to be caught, Grant said, wanted to plead guilty to a crime that could net him up to a year in jail. It was a means of securing a warm place to stay and to eat, even if that place was the Metropolitan Detention Center.

"You can't do that," Grant told the man, his head down, his eyes distant. "I can't allow you to get yourself purposely arrested just to have a place to eat and sleep."

There are homeless shelters and soup kitchens, she told him.

There is jail crowding, she didn't tell him.

But Mr. Gutierrez didn't like to trouble shelters and soup kitchens. He was a loner who asked nothing of no one.

"That's his chosen lifestyle," Grant said. "He's not a drain on society, not accessing any social services, nor does he want to."

He had found a way to live well below the radar, and until the bitter cold and biting hunger hit, until he was spotted snoozing in the library, he might never have come to the court's attention.

Until then, maybe he hadn't thought of his life as all that wretched.

"He likes to daydream," said Jennifer Vallejos, a judicial lead worker who deals with Homeless Court and who on that day was asked to deal with Mr. Gutierrez. "He lies down and watches the sky. He doesn't really do anything. He likes being homeless."

There was something likable about Mr. Gutierrez, something polite and articulate and different from the other homeless folks who traveled in and out of the courthouse. So on this day, Grant, Vallejos and a half-dozen more Metro Court employees came together to give Mr. Gutierrez a good meal, good conversation and the goodness of their humanity.

Vallejos offered him the peanut butter crackers she kept in a drawer. Another clerk brought him soup. Another brought him an orange, an item he prized for its healthful benefits.

Grant knew there was even more food to be had from what remained of a retirement potluck for a court supervisor.

He accepted it all with relish, nibbling politely and savoring each bite, especially a green bean casserole with bacon bits, a food he hadn't tasted in years.

"Everybody's sitting there feeding Mr. Gutierrez, and there he is smiling from ear to ear," Grant said. "But everybody else was smiling, too."

After the impromptu feast, Mr. Gutierrez thanked his court benefactors and walked back into the cold and onto the brutal streets that he favored, alone.

"What I was trying to do was get him into a shelter or a program to help him," Vallejos said. "But he just politely said he didn't want anybody's help."

The folks at Metro Court say they don't know where he went that day or where he is now. Maybe a camp in the tangles of the bosque. Maybe somewhere near the railroad tracks or in the eaves of a freeway overpass.

"He just said he likes to stay somewhere away from people," Vallejos said.

But for a few moments that day last month, he allowed the Metro Court folks to come a little closer, to help him just a little.

And, maybe, it helped them all just a little as well.