Brock Crabb was walking down the hall at Toombs County High School when his life changed dramatically.
It was around lunch time and his case worker met him there with some surprising news. She packed him up and took him to Herrington Homestead in Nunez. “I really didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “I’d dealt with DFCS all my life but I’d never gotten taken away, so I had no idea what was about to happen.”
“Everybody there was really nice,” he said. “The guys became family. They helped me feel really at home. I ended up falling in love with it. It changed my life, really.
He spent ninth and tenth grades there before moving to Florida to stay with his father and rejoin his brother.“
The last time I’d seen him before then was when I was seven years old,” he said. “Every time he’d find out where we were, we moved. So I was able to establish that relationship again with my father.”
He graduated from high school in Florida but kept in touch with the youth home that had been so influential in his life. The staff there still made themselves available when he needed assistance. Within a few years he was back in south Georgia and living with his wife, whose mother is now a staff member at Herrington Homestead. This has allowed Crabb, now 30, to maintain an even stronger connection there, even though he travels around the country with his job.
“It’s pretty cool,” he said. “So now we go to the Christmas parties and other events, and I’m still associated with them that way.”
The lessons he learned there have stayed with him and will continue to do so. “I picked up guitar there and am still playing guitar to this day,” he said. “I learned how different things should be — how family should be, how caring for and loving somebody should be.”