Foster teen gets his forever home

(CNN) — The boy who asked a church to help him find a forever parent finally has one.

Desperate for a home in 2013, Davion Navar Henry Only dressed up in a suit and borrowed a Bible from the boys home where he lived. Then he headed to a St. Petersburg, Florida, church to make a plea for his own adoption.

Now 16 years old, he had lived his entire life in foster care, bouncing from one home to another. The older he got, the less likely it was that he would be adopted.

But the Tampa Bay Times documented his journey, and a video of his plea went viral. Thousands of calls came into his agency, and a minster’s family in Ohio asked him to come live with them. But he got into a fight with one of their sons, and they sent him back to Florida.

Forever wasn’t forever in that case.

And to the people who asked what went wrong, his social worker had the answer. “That boy spent his whole life in the system, that’s what went wrong,” Connie Going told the Tampa Bay Times.

For a year, he went through four more foster homes and wouldn’t speak about what happened in Ohio. Finally, he reached out to Going, the woman who had been there for him since he was 7.

Only had repeatedly asked her to adopt him, but she didn’t think that she could be enough for him. She already had three children, ages 21, 17 and 14. But something changed in that latest call, and she knew she would finally say yes. So did her three children.

Going rented a larger house, and Only moved into the home after his new mom passed the home study. His official adoption date is April 22.

“I guess I always thought of you as my mom,” Only told her before Christmas. “Only now I get to call you that for real, right?”