Homeless, penniless and strung out on crack cocaine, Pensola Parsons stood on a fourth-floor window ledge outside a seedy motel room, looking down into an empty swimming pool, searching for a reason not to jump.

Twenty-five years of addiction and alcoholism had her separated from her daughter and skulking about "the bottom" -- East Augusta -- looking for her next fix, she said. She ate out of garbage cans and pawed food from half-eaten plates while passing glass pipes in abandoned houses. Two weeks earlier, she'd skipped her daughter's 14th birthday, oblivious to frantic attempts to reach her by pager.

She stepped back into the motel room.

"I knew that I was going to try one more thing," Ms. Parsons said. "I went into the bathroom just screaming, 'Jesus, Jesus, just help me just one more time!' "

That one more thing: Hope House, a shelter for addicted women that she'd heard about during past attempts to get clean. She checked in on Halloween 2001 and she's been sober ever since.

"That was the day my life began," said Ms. Parsons, 45, who is now a job coach in the vocational program at Goodwill Industries and a weekend assistant counselor at Hope House.

Next month, the shelter she turned to will be able to help more than twice as many women, thanks to the tireless efforts of its late Executive Director Jerry Carrier, whose voice Ms. Parsons remembers saying, "Don't ever forget where you came from," during the early years of her recovery.

Dr. Carrier, a professor emeritus of pharmacology and toxicology at Medical College of Georgia, used his grant-writing skills to raise $4.5 million for a new facility, The Highlands West off Highland Avenue, which is more than five times the size of the Hope House off Wrightsboro Road.

Its ribbon cutting Thursday would have been a proud moment for Dr. Carrier, but he didn't live to see it. He died in September of lung disease at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., in his last days working on his laptop in his hospital bed trying to raise more government and corporate money, his friends said.

"This was Jerry's dream," Charles Bellman, a former Metro Augusta Chamber of Commerce executive director whom Dr. Carrier hired as a consultant, told a crowd packed into a room that will soon be a therapeutic child care center. The gathering included state Sen. Ed Tarver, state Rep. Quincy Murphy, Augusta Commissioner Don Grantham and a representative of the state Department of Community Affairs.

Hope House Executive Director Karen Saltzman said residents at Wrightsboro Road will start moving in the first week of December. The Highlands West can house 42 families -- homeless, addicted and mentally troubled women and their children, all of whom will get mental health treatment.

Ms. Parsons said when she lived at the first Hope House on Milledgeville Road, counselors helped her get a driver's license and find a job at Three Springs of Augusta, which treats juvenile delinquents with drug and alcohol problems.

She worked her way up from a cook to an assistant unit director, she said. She moved into her own apartment and reunited with her daughter.

"I was a burden to society," Ms. Parsons said. "I was the person y'all had to pay for through welfare, taxes, whatever.

"Now I pay my taxes," she said. "I'm a functioning member of society. I have values, morals. I don't do those things that I used to do on the street. I'm a lady now."

Reach Johnny Edwards at (706) 823-3225 or johnny.edwards@augustachronicle.com.