[Torri’ell Norwood (in the back) poses for a selfie with A’zarria Simmons. Norwood performed CPR on Simmons after a car accident on February 20. Photo via CNN.com]
Torri’ell Norwood, 17, saved the life of her best friend A’zarria Simmons, 16, just one day after learning basic life support in class at her high school, Lakewood High, according to cnn.com.
Norwood was driving three friends home in St. Petersburg, Florida, on February 20 of this year when another driver slammed into her from her left and sent her car careening.
The impact jammed shut the driver’s side door, so Norwood climbed out the front window. Two of her friends managed to get out of the car unharmed, but the collision caused Simmons to hit her head on the backseat window.
“When I turned around, I didn’t see A’zarria running with us,” Norwood told CNN. “So, I had to run back to the car as fast as I can. She was just sitting there unresponsive.”
And that’s when the training Norwood had just learned kicked in. She pulled Simmons out of the back seat, avoiding broken glass from the window.
“That’s when I checked her pulse on her neck. I put my head against her chest, and I didn’t really hear nothing. So that’s when I just started doing CPR on her.”
After the 30 compressions and two rescue breaths, Simmons regained consciousness. Paramedics quickly arrived and rushed her to the hospital, where she received stitches for a gash in her forehead.
“I don’t remember the hit or anything about accident. But when I woke up, I was in the hospital. I was in shock. I was trying to figure out how I got there,” Simmons said.
Norwood participates in Lakewood’s Athletic Lifestyle Management Academy. The program exists to prepare students for varied careers in the health sciences.
Thanks to Norwood’s quick thinking,CPR lesson retention and heroic actions, Simmons is recovering well. Both friends plan to pursue careers in the medical field.
“I do want to be a nurse,” Norwood said. “I know that if somebody was in need of help, I’d go to the rescue.”
“My name is Davion and I’ve been in foster care since I was born. I know God hasn’t given up on me. So I’m not giving up either.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnU7b577Faw&w=560&h=315]
His request to find a family was picked up by a local news station and more than 10,000 people from around the country responded. Unfortunately, after a brief stint at a home in Ohio with a potential adopter, he went back to Florida and was placed in four different homes over the next year. (Image Credit: Instagram)
But that all changed last July when he called a woman he’d known since he was seven— his case worker, Connie Bell Going.
According to Yahoo! Parenting, Only would ask Going every year to adopt him, but she always believed there was a better family out there for him.
Something in her heart changed, though, when he made the request again last summer. She explained:
“In adoption there is a ‘claiming moment,’ when you know [someone is] your child. When he called me to ask, in that moment, I just knew.”
So after a successful test run with her family — she has two daughters and a son whom she adopted out of foster care — Going started the adoption proceedings for Only.
(Image Credit: Twitter)
On April 22, 2015, the adoption proceedings will be finalized and Only will officially have a forever family.
“Today, I am feeling blessed and honored by being chosen to be the parent to all my children,” she said. “I work every day on being the best parent I can to them, to be patient and creative so that I can meet all their needs.”
Only is over the moon about his new family, and always believed Going to be his mom. He told her:
“I guess I always thought of you as my mom. Only now I get to call you that for real, right?”
(Image Credit: Twitter)
And Going feels exactly the same way.
“When he asked me, my heart felt this ache and I just knew he was my son,” she said.
After years of moving from place to place — never having anything to call his own — Only is finally home.
Foster teen Davion Navar Henry Only has been looking for a “forever home” his whole life; now he’s taking his plea to church. (Courtesy of Eckerd)
Fifteen-year-old Davion Navar Henry Only stood before a packed crowd at St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church in St. Petersburg, Fla., three weeks ago, his hands sweating and fidgeting, and for good reason: He was about to tell hundreds of congregants that he was looking for his “forever family.”
Only was born in prison and has spent his entire life in foster care. He lives at Eckerd’s Carlton Manor, a group home in St. Petersburg, where he has struggled to come into his own, often losing focus in school, fighting anger issues, and alienating himself from everyone he knows. His mother, LaDwina Ilene “Big Dust” McCloud, who served time for petty theft and drug charges, died on June 5, 2013, at the age of 55. It wasn’t until Only found his mother’s mug shot online just weeks after she died that he decided to take control of his future.
“Davion required some specialized recruitment efforts,” Connie Going, Only’s caseworker and an adoption specialist for Eckerd Community Alternatives, told Newsweek. She has known Only since he was five years old, and while she may be his fiercest advocate, she is also personally invested in his future. “I’m connected to him through my own adoptive son, who is 13; they met in a residential program together,” she said. “My own son was in care from three-and-a-half and he was adopted at 13 — and he was a return adopted child — so I know you can make a difference in these children’s lives.”
Navigating traditional channels has not helped Only find his adoptive family. Indeed, his photo was one of the first portraits to appear in the Heart Gallery, which showcases portraits of local foster children looking for adoptive parents — not with mug shot-style snapshots but with the kinds of pictures that parents pay professionals to produce. Only’s photo shows him in gray pants and a white T-shirt tossing a basketball on the beach; his profile, which reads “I am available,” reveals that he loves dogs, Chinese food and studying science, and wants to be a police officer when he grows up. His first portrait was posted when he was 7 years old (he has had two more taken since then), but the Heart Gallery has yet to lead to a permanent home.
“There is a family out there for him; we just needed to do more to find that family,” Going said. “So many children age out of foster care and we did not want that to happen to Davion.”
When Only attended his mother’s funeral earlier this year, he met some of his relatives. They weren’t appropriate adoptive parents for him — Going explained that finding the right family means looking for certain strengths, including strong parenting skills and the ability to understand what a foster child needs for her or her future — but they did care about him. “One of the things they told Davion was that he was loved,” Going explained. “He got in the car and said, ‘I didn’t know I was loved, Miss Connie.’ That began the turning point.”
