This L.A. Foster Father Only Takes In Terminally Ill Children He Knows Will Die

The children were going to die.

Mohamed Bzeek always knew that, but as a foster father for more than two years, he took them in any way — the sickest of the sick in Los Angeles County’s sprawling foster care system.

He has buried about ten children. Some died in his arms.

Bzeek currently spends long days and sleepless nights caring for a bedridden 6-year-old girl with a rare brain defect. She is blind and deaf. She has daily seizures. Her arms and legs are paralyzed.

Bzeek, a quiet, devout Libyan-born Muslim who lives in Azusa, just wants her to know she’s not alone in this life.

“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” he said, “I’m always holding her, playing with her, touching her. … She has feelings. She has a soul. She’s a human being.”

Of the 35,000 children monitored by the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, there are about 600 children at any given time who fall under the care of the department’s Medical Case Management Services (MCMS).

MCMS serves those with the most severe medical needs, according to Rosella Yousef, an assistant regional administrator for the unit.

There is a dire need for foster parents to care for such children.

And there is only one person like Bzeek.

“If anyone ever calls us and says, ‘This kid needs to go home on hospice,’ there’s only one name we think of,” said Melissa Testerman, a DCFS intake coordinator who finds placements for sick children. “He’s the only one that would take a child who would possibly not make it,” she added.

Typically, she said, children with complex conditions are placed in medical facilities or with nurses who have opted to become foster parents.

But Bzeek is the only foster parent in the county known to take in terminally-ill children, Yousef said. Though she knows the single father is stretched thin caring for the girl, who requires around-the-clock care, Yousef still approached him at a department Christmas party in December and asked if he could take in another sick child.

This time, Bzeek politely declined.

The girl sits propped up with pillows in the corner of Bzeek’s living room couch. She has long, thin brown hair pulled into a ponytail and perfectly arched eyebrows over unseeing gray eyes.

Because of confidentiality laws, the girl is not being identified. But, a particular court order allowed The Times to spend time at Bzeek’s home and to interview people involved in his foster daughter’s case.

The girl’s head is too small for her 34-pound body, which is also small for her age. She was born with encephalocele, a rare malformation in which part of her brain protruded through an opening in her skull, according to Dr. Suzanne Roberts, the girl’s pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Neurosurgeons removed the protruding brain tissue shortly after her birth, but much of her brain remains undeveloped.

She has been in Bzeek’s care since she was a month old. Before her, he cared for three other children with the same condition.

“These kids, it’s a life sentence for them,” he said.

Bzeek, 62, is a portly man with a long, dark beard and a soft voice. The oldest of 10 children, he came to this country from Libya as a college student in 1978.

Years later, through a mutual friend, he met a woman named Dawn, who would become his wife. She had become a foster parent in the early 1980s before she met Bzeek. Her grandparents had been foster parents, and she was inspired by them, Bzeek said. Before she reached Bzeek, she opened her home as an emergency shelter for foster children who needed immediate placement or who were placed in protective custody.

Dawn Bzeek fell in love with every child she took in. She took them to professional holiday photo sessions, and she organized Christmas gift donation drives for foster children.

She was funny, Bzeek said during a recent drive home from the hospital. She was terrified of spiders and bugs, so much that even Halloween decorations creeped her out — but she was never scared by the children’s illnesses or the possibility that she would die, Bzeek said.

The Bzeeks opened their Azusa home to dozens of children. They taught classes on foster parenting — and how to handle a child’s illness and death — at community colleges. Dawn Bzeek was such a highly-regarded foster mother that her name appeared on statewide task forces for improving foster care alongside doctors and policymakers.

Bzeek started caring for foster children with Dawn in 1989, he said. Often, the children were ill.

Mohamed Bzeek first experienced the death of a foster child in 1991. She was the child of a farm worker who was pregnant when she breathed in toxic pesticides sprayed by crop dusters. The girl was born with a spinal disorder, wore a full body cast, and wasn’t yet a year old when she died on July 4, 1991, as the Bzeeks prepared dinner.

“This one hurt me so badly when she died,” Bzeek said, glancing at a photograph of a tiny girl in a frilly white dress, lying in a coffin surrounded by yellow flowers.

By the mid-1990s, the Bzeeks decided to correctly care for terminally ill children who had do-not-resuscitate orders because no one else would take them in.

There was the boy with the short-gut syndrome who was admitted to the hospital 167 times in his eight-year life. He could never eat solid food, but the Bzeeks would sit him at the dinner table, with his empty plate and spoon so that he could sit with them as a family.

Then there was the girl with the same brain condition as Bzeek’s current foster daughter, who lived for eight days after they brought her home. She was so tiny that when she died, a doll maker made an outfit for her funeral. Bzeek carried her coffin in his hands like a shoebox.

“The key is you have to love them like your own,” Bzeek said recently, “I know they are sick. I know they are going to die. I do my best as a human being and leave the rest to God.”