During the summer of 2019, four-year-old Jacob and his three older brothers stood on the sidewalk with nowhere else to go.
After hopping around hotels and overstaying their welcome at a local Greenwood nonprofit, they had exhausted all their options. That was, until Connie Maxwell received a call about their situation.
With just one trash bag of their few belongings in hand, the kids were welcomed at Connie Maxwell. The older boys were eventually moved to a long-term residential cottage, but Jacob stayed at Cooper Nixon, Connie Maxwell’s crisis cottage, where he could get more support at his young age.
“He ended up with us for a year,” said Emily Kimberly, one of Jacob’s house parents. Although kids are usually placed in the emergency shelter cottage for just 90 days, in some circumstances, they stay longer if it’s better for the child.
“Of course, it didn’t take very long for him to wrap his little self right around our hearts and fall in love with him,” Kimberly said, noting that Jacob has the best smile.
Over the next several months, Jacob struggled to adjust to kindergarten. But with his cottage parents’ dedication and his own hard work, he overcame most of his disruptive outbursts.
“Those became not an everyday occurrence. They were less often just getting him out on the farm and letting him kick a soccer ball or taking him fishing and taking him to the beach and letting him run around,” said Dawn Callahan, another one of Jacob’s house parents.
In fact, he was excelling so much that he was able to move to a long-term cottage at Connie Maxwell. But just a few weeks later, his world shifted once again.
Amid challenging circumstances and unsafe living conditions with his biological family, the Department of Social Services (DSS) decided to place Jacob and his brothers into foster care.
That’s when Danielle Pete received a phone call that would change her life. Jacob, now 6 years old, needed a home.
She said yes knowing very little about him—just that he wears glasses and wouldn’t be bringing any items with him.
That night, her husband Daniel picked up pepperoni pizza on the way home, ready to meet their first ever foster placement. For years after having their daughter, the couple had wanted another child but experienced secondary infertility.
“I walked in the door and came around the corner and he jumped out from the living room into the hallway wearing that little yellow tie dye shirt,” Daniel recalled. “He had a big ole’ smile on his face and was just happy to see somebody and got real excited for pizza.”
At first, Jacob was very well-behaved in the Petes’ home during what Danielle calls a “honeymoon period.” But after a few months, Jacob started having behavioral issues.
“He had a lot of aggression,” Danielle explained. “I’m a therapist by profession so I knew what to watch for, what to look for, and what services to ask for. So, a lot of it was advocating, because I knew what was going on and I knew why it was going on, but we just had to get the right help.”
The Petes recognized Jacob’s behaviors were a result of the trauma he had experienced and the lack of attachment from a caregiver.
“His brothers were at Connie Maxwell, but they were all at different cottages and then taken away from Connie Maxwell, where he loved and then taken away from mom, which, although an unsafe, chaotic situation, it’s still another displacement,” Danielle said. “So, a lot of those factors, and then the specific trauma that he experienced, I’m sure, fed into his fight or flight, which resulted in more fight than flight.”
Jacob got kicked out of the YMCA, and schools called Danielle constantly about his behavioral issues.
“It was a struggle, but I knew he was worth fighting for—and somebody needed to fight the good fight,” Danielle said.
Yet, even with the challenges, the Petes loved seeing Jacob exude joy in everyday moments and have first-time experiences, like throwing the football back and forth in the yard and celebrating his soccer team championship win.
Around a year-and-a-half after Jacob went to live with the Petes, he asked if they planned to adopt him.
The Petes had been committed to do so from the very beginning, but there were some unforeseen obstacles. Reunification was still the goal of Jacob’s case plan.
“Behaviorally, he had gotten so much better. He had worked through his trauma,” said Danielle, referring to Jacob’s behavior after living two-and-a-half years with them. “He had just made leaps and bounds, and it was like he was a part of the family unit.”
In August 2021, DSS called Danielle to tell her that one of Jacob’s relatives had passed qualifications to have Jacob move in with her. He would be moving to his relative’s home in New York in a month.
The news rocked the Petes.
After consulting with friends and praying over their situation, the Petes decided to take legal action to fight to keep Jacob in their home. Under South Carolina law, Jacob’s plan for reunification shouldn’t have been extended beyond 18 months after he was placed in foster care.
“God just provided each step of the way,” said Danielle, explaining how a local businessman felt called to pay for the tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills.
On March 13, 2024, the Petes were about to walk into the courthouse in Anderson when they noticed something unusual happening outside. A local Christian school had taken kids on a field trip to encourage people like the Petes who were going into court.
“There were tons of kids who were writing messages all over the ground that said stuff like, ‘Jesus loves you.’ ‘God’s got this.’ ‘It’ll be okay.’ And it was just obviously really encouraging to see as we’re going into fight to keep our son,” Danielle said.
But that wasn’t the Pete’s only support that day.
“We had tons of people who came to advocate for us,” Danielle said, including staff members from Connie Maxwell.
After another day in court, the Petes won their case, and the judge announced they could legally adopt Jacob. The following month, on April 11— after 1,592 days in foster care—Jacob was adopted into his forever home with the Petes.
“God placed him with the perfect family for him. And we could not be happier. It could have gone a lot of different ways,” Kimberly said. “He could have been shuffled around from family to family to family, but just to see that he found a family that was willing to put in the time and put in the effort and to put in the hard days and really, really love him. It’s nothing less than he deserved. It’s just thrilling.”
CONNIE MAXWELL’S FOSTER PARENTS ‘OPEN THEIR HOMES AND THEIR HEARTS’
Over the last year and a half, Connie Maxwell has experienced a record number of adoptions. In 2024 alone, Connie Maxwell helped with a dozen adoptions.
“The goal of foster care is reunification, but that just doesn’t always happen,” said Paula Reed, Connie Maxwell’s Director of Foster Care. “But we have such good foster parents, people who are willing to open their homes and their hearts to adopt these kids that can’t go home.”
Reed hopes that many more children will find homes with their forever families like the Petes through Connie Maxwell.
“We want the kids to go home if that’s possible, but we’re thankful to have good adoptive families when that needs to be the case,” Reed said.
