Mohamed Bzeek: The Foster Father Who Only Takes the Children Nobody Else Will

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Bearded man holds a young girl at sunset on a beach with ducks; caption reads Mohamed Bzeek: The Foster Father Who...

Los Angeles County's Department of Children and Family Services oversees roughly six hundred children with the most severe medical needs in its entire system. When one of those children is expected to die soon and needs somewhere to spend their final weeks or months, staff there say there's only one name they think to call. For more than three decades, Mohamed Bzeek has been the only foster parent in the county willing to take children other homes won't.

He's cared for more than eighty of them since 1989. Ten have died in his arms. He keeps going anyway, and the reason he gives for it has nothing to do with heroism at all. To understand why, it helps to start with how an engineering student from Tripoli ended up being that one name on the list.

From Tripoli to Azusa

Bzeek was born in Tripoli, Libya, in 1954. He came to the United States in 1978 as a college student and former marathon runner, intending to study engineering. He met his future wife, Dawn, in America and became a naturalised US citizen in 1997. Dawn was already working as a foster parent when they married, and Bzeek started fostering alongside her. At first the couple took in children with ordinary medical issues. In 1995, they made a decision that would define the rest of both their lives: from then on, they would foster only children who were terminally ill.

That decision is exactly what made Bzeek the name every social worker in the county now reaches for first.

The only name DCFS thinks to call

"If anyone ever calls us and says, this kid needs to go home on hospice, there's only one name we think of," a DCFS intake coordinator who places sick children told the Los Angeles Times, whose 2017 story first brought Bzeek's work to wide public attention. Neil Zanville, another DCFS spokesperson, put it even more plainly to CBC: without Bzeek, children like the ones in his care would spend their final months in a medical facility instead of a home, since he might be the only person in the entire county willing to take a child with that little time left.

Naming the children who arrived without one

Being the last option in the county means Bzeek regularly gets children nobody else has claimed at all, sometimes not even with a name. Almost all of them come directly from Los Angeles County hospitals as infants, handed over by parents unable to meet their needs. "In the hospital, they give birth, they leave them," Bzeek has said. "Their families don't name them. It comes on the paper: baby boy, baby girl." He gives them one himself. In more than two decades of caring for dying children, ten have died. None of them died nameless.

A son who needs him just as much

All of this happens alongside raising a child of his own. Bzeek's biological son, Adam, was born with brittle bone disease and a form of dwarfism that requires full-time care in its own right. Raising a medically fragile child gave Bzeek and Dawn direct, personal experience with exactly the kind of round-the-clock caregiving that made them willing to take on other families' hardest cases too. At the height of their fostering, the couple looked after as many as three terminally ill children at once, with a rotation of nurses helping manage the load. Bzeek used to joke that he had four women living in his house: his wife and three nurses.

Carrying on alone

That household didn't stay full forever. Dawn died in 2014 after years of declining health. Without her, Bzeek lost the capacity to care for more than one child at a time, and the work fell entirely on him. He kept going anyway, taking in children with conditions ranging from spina bifida to severe brain damage to immune systems too weak to fight off ordinary infections. One foster daughter, diagnosed with a rare brain condition and given only a few weeks to live, ended up living years longer than doctors expected. A regional administrator for the county's medical case management services credited that directly to Bzeek, saying his care alone was what kept her thriving well past what anyone had predicted.

Facing cancer with no one beside him

Losing Dawn wasn't the only time Bzeek had to face something enormous without a partner beside him. In 2016, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He checked himself into hospital for treatment with no family member able to sit with him, and he's said openly how frightening that was, facing surgery entirely alone. He's pointed to that experience since as a reminder of exactly why he does what he does: so that the children in his care never have to face illness, or the end of their lives, without someone beside them who loves them.

What the days actually look like

That philosophy plays out in ordinary, unglamorous ways every single day. For years, the child in Bzeek's care has been a girl with a severe brain condition who is blind, deaf and unable to move her arms or legs on her own, along with seizures that can strike at any point in the day or night. She can't speak, but Bzeek has said she still makes her needs known in her own way, and that her life isn't the constant suffering people might assume it is. She has moments of real contentment, and he credits that almost entirely to the stability of simply having a home and a family around her rather than a hospital room. He holds her through the seizures, talks to her constantly even though she can't hear him, and has said plainly that just because she can't see or hear doesn't mean she doesn't have feelings, or a soul, or deserve to know somebody is there.

Recognition, finally

Bzeek worked in near total obscurity for almost thirty years before the Los Angeles Times profiled him in 2017. That single story set off a wave of national and international coverage, from NPR and PBS NewsHour to a GoFundMe campaign that raised money for basics like central heating and air conditioning, since both his son and his foster children struggle to regulate their own body temperature.

A Turkish documentary crew followed his work for the 2018 film Guardian of Angels, which went on to earn recognition at the International Istanbul Film Festival. That October, Turkey's TRT World named him its Citizen of the Year at a ceremony in Istanbul, putting him alongside honourees like Somali physician Hawa Abdi and Afghan educator Sakena Yacoobi.

Bzeek has never been entirely comfortable with any of the attention. Asked directly about being called a local hero, he's waved the label away without hesitation, insisting he isn't an angel or a hero at all, just someone doing what any human being is supposed to do for another.

Still the only name on the list

Decades on, Bzeek is still the foster parent Los Angeles County calls first when a child needs a home to die in rather than a hospital ward. He's outlived his wife, survived his own cancer, and continued raising his disabled son alongside whichever child currently needs him most, all without ever taking what he calls a sick day of his own. Asked once what happens if he gets sick, his answer was simple: a father doesn't get a sick day. Somewhere in Los Angeles County tonight, among those roughly six hundred children with nowhere else built for them, there's still only one name anyone thinks to call.