Story by Davon Woods
Our biological mother Patricia Jacobs was using drugs while she was pregnant with us. To be more specific, she was doing crack cocaine. The whole time she was pregnant with us she never visited the hospital, in fact she didn’t even know she was pregnant with twins. So when she finally went into labor, I (Davon) came out first then they were getting ready to close her up and discovered another baby stuck under her rib cage and it was Tavon. They said we was so small we could’ve fit in a shoe box we were 2lbs, we also came back positive for crack so we were considered crack babies. Immediately DSS got involved and they took us out of the hospital, our family fought to get us but none of them were able to.
We were placed into foster care and then at the age of two years old we got adopted by the woods family, my biological name was Daquane Shamar Jacobs and my brother’s name was Tavon Lamar Jacobs. Once we got adopted by the Woods family they changed our names to Davon Sammie Woods and Tavon Sammie Woods. Growing up was very hard because we didn’t know anything about the family we were staying with, we didn’t know anything about ourselves, or our biological family. We had so many questions but they were left unanswered. We felt like we were just a check in our parents eyes, they never told us they loved us, we got beaten for small issues, we never had a voice, they would yell at us for no reason, and we dealt with a lot of verbal abuse.
I (Davon) tried to commit suicide multiple times because I didn’t want to live anymore because of how we were being treated but the only reason I didn’t was because of my brother and I didn’t want him to be alone. We started smoking and drinking around the age of 11, we were dealing with so much at a young age we were afraid to tell people what was going on because we were afraid of our parents and what they would do. I remember nights on my knees praying to God asking him why he had to put us through what we were going through. We didn’t do to well in school, we were barely making it we were too worried about everything else except school.
We found our biological family when we were 17 years old in Sumter, SC at the shopping mall. And this is how it happen so we were on the way back from Columbia, SC and Tavon said let’s stop at the mall in Sumter and I was like no I don’t want to go there, but we ended up going any way and as we were leaving Rue 21, this guy approached us and said y’all look like my cousin and in our head we were like everyone says that. then we told him our biological last name and he was like y’all are my cousins and we have been looking for y’all for years. That’s when he started calling all of our family members and connecting us with everyone.
That’s when we started sneaking and going to see our biological family and would tell our adopted parents that we were going to do something else. But when we met our biological family it was very emotional and it felt weird because we never knew anything about them and it’s like when we finally met them it was very different. Our biological mother didn’t really show the affection that we expected. Once we graduated high school we went to school for modeling and acting, we did that for a few years and then we got introduced to the street life. We started selling drugs at the age of 18-19 that’s when our life started to change tremendously. We were still hurting and dealing with issues from our past so we thought smoking, drinking, running the streets, having sex and etc would allow us to forget about the pain. We always wanted to do something positive in life but our past had us messed up so bad and we didn’t know what love was so it was hard to love others.
In 2016 our little brother got shot and killed. He was only 17 years old. When that happened, it changed our lives forever. Me and my brother moved around a lot in life and that’s when we decide to move to Georgia because we wanted to start a new journey. But when we moved to Georgia it seem like our life have gotten crazier we started hanging with guys that were associated with gangs. Me and my brother seen people get shot right in front of us and we’ve been in a situation where guns were drawn on us and we could’ve lost our lives. It seem like every day something bad was happening and that’s when we decided to seek a major change. Because I knew that if we kept living the way we were, we wouldn’t be here today.
That’s when one day our brother in law and sister came to see us and ask us if we wanted to go to church, and we were just about to go smoke and we weren’t going to go, but we went anyway. That’s when we started going regularly and we gave our life to God and he transformed our whole life around. We always wanted to do right in life but we never had any directions but that’s when we came in contact with God and he gave us direction. Our goal is to fight for every child in the foster care system and be able to give them the opportunity to be kids, we just want the world to know what we had to go through and what every child have to experience in this foster care system.
Me and my brother had a opportunity to work at a group home called AMIkids and since that very first day there, the kids were attached to us because they had staff that could relate to them. Me and my brother would spend so much time with those kids, they use to be so excited to see us coming to work, we understood those kids. We worked there for 1 year and we impacted so many kids lives. But the owner and the director didn’t like what we were doing. There were a lot of issues taking place there so we would call the state and AMIkids’ headquarters because of how the kids were being treated, but those call/emails didn’t help. Even after countless numbers of complaints nothing ever happened. They wouldn’t allow the kids to go off campus, they wouldn’t allow the kids to spend their own money, they wouldn’t allow the kids to do a lot of things. Those kids were screaming for help but help never came.
One day, my brother and I came to work and we weren’t scheduled to work at that time. They told us we had to leave because they had us working night shift and we told them that we couldn’t work night shift but they were doing all they could so they could have a reason to fire us.
When they told us to leave the facility we didn’t leave because we told them we would stay until our scheduled time because we wanted to spend time with the kids. So that’s when they told if we didn’t leave the facility they would call the police on us, so we finally left and they suspended us for a week and then they fired us. Those kids were broken once we left and now a lot of our kids that were trying to change their lives around are now locked up or on drugs really bad, and most of them aren’t doing anything with their life.
Eventually, I found other work making 6k a month, but my journey helping kids wasn’t over. Despite the financial comfort, I decided to quit my job so I could focus on these kids. I realized we are their voice and they need people like us.
Fighting for kids in the foster care system is my passion and I love being the voice for the children that are voiceless. These innocent kids are being abused, raped, molested, neglected, beat to death and so much more. Our mission is to build the biggest facility in the world for kids in the system and give them a life they never had. We plan to travel all around the world to fight for each and every child that have been failed by this wicked system.
“Doing what we do isn’t easy but it’s most definitely worth it”
Davon Woods
You can follow his journey on: Facebook, Instagram and his brother’s here.
