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Man adopted at 32: A San Diego man was formally adopted by his foster mother 20 years later.
A 32-year-old San Diego man was adopted by his foster family 20 years after he was removed from their home.
“It was the best day in my life,” Maurice Griffin, who was adopted by former foster mother Lisa Godbold, said after he signed the proceeds in the San Diego Juvenile Court.
“I fought for 10 years and finally the day came,” he told CNN.
In the 1980s, Godbold and her husband saw Griffin at an orphanage near the couple’s home in Sacramento. He was later adopted and recalls fitting in well with the family.
“We were best friends,” Griffin said of Godbold’s two children. “We’d run around, we did mischievous things and fun things. It was a good time.”
He lived with the family for four years until he was 13 before foster officials told the family he could not live with them anymore. Maurice innocently shared the idea that he should be disciplined like the Godbold’s children. “I told her they were going to be spanking me. She told her superiors and her superiors told her I had to be taken out,” he said, according to Fox 5 television
“You can’t spank foster children. Maurice very much wanted that,” Godbold told CNN. “We wanted him to feel like the rest of our kids. And there was a difference of opinion with some of the (child welfare) supervisors.”
“It’s like being abducted from your family and being told to deal with it,” said Griffin, referring to when he was split up from the Godbolds, according to NBC San Diego.
He was split up from the family until six years ago, when Godbold was able to find Griffin on MySpace.
Griffin lives in San Diego and Godbold lives in San Jose, Calif., but the two said they would visit often.
Griffin said that foster care can work. ”I’m a living example of it, that I have been through it,” Griffin told CNN. “I just never stopped. It will all work out.”
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