Davion Only with Connie Going, the adoption case worker who will officially become his mother later this month.
A 16-year-old in foster care whose plea to be adopted went viral in 2013 has finally found a home. His adoption case worker, who has known him since he was 7, will become his adoptive mother this month.
In October 2013, Davion Only spoke in front of a church congregation in St. Petersburg, Florida, and made an appeal for adoption. He had recently learned that his biological mother, who’d been in jail since Only was born, had died. He’d spent years bouncing between foster homes. “My name is Davion and I’ve been in foster care since I was born,” he said. “I know God hasn’t given up on me, so I’m not giving up either.”
In 2013, Davion Only made a plea at a local church for a family to adopt him.
The heartbreaking plea went viral, and Only’s foster agency received calls from more than 10,000 people, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Only ended up traveling to Ohio to live with a minister’s family. But after Only got into a physical fight with one of his older would-be siblings, the minister and his wife changed their minds.
Back in Florida, Only passed through four different temporary homes over the next year, until he called Connie Going, his adoption case worker, to make a special request.
Only had known Going for nearly ten years, and had asked every year if she would adopt him but she always hesitated. “I always believed there was a better family than us out there,” Going tells Yahoo Parenting. “He deserves so much in this world.”
Connie Going, who will adopt Davion Only later this month, has known him since he was 7. (Credit: Rachel Bertsche, Yahoo News. Photo credit: Melissa Lyttle/Tampa Bay Times/Zuma Press).