24/01/2026
In 1978, a young marathon runner from Libya arrived in the United States with dreams of becoming an engineer.
Mohamed Bzeek had no way of knowing that his American dream would transform into something far greater than any career, something that would cost him everything and give him everything in return.
Today, at nearly seventy years old, Mohamed is known by a title that exists nowhere else in Los Angeles County: the only foster parent who exclusively takes in terminally ill children.
The ones no one else will accept. The babies born so sick that doctors give them weeks to live. The children with do-not-resuscitate orders. The forgotten ones who would otherwise spend their final days in hospital rooms, alone.
For over three decades, Mohamed has said yes to them all.
His journey into fostering began in 1989 when he married Dawn, a woman who had been caring for foster children since the early 1980s. Her grandparents had been foster parents, and she carried their legacy forward. After their wedding, Mohamed joined her mission.
Together, they opened their modest home in Azusa, California, to children with medical challenges. They learned to manage feeding tubes, oxygen tanks, and round-the-clock care. They taught classes at community colleges on how to handle a child's illness and, inevitably, their death.
In 1995, they made a decision that would define the rest of their lives.
They would care only for terminally ill children. The ones everyone else refused.
"If anyone ever calls us and says, 'This kid needs to go home on hospice,' there's only one name we think of," says Melissa Testerman, an intake coordinator for the Department of Children and Family Services. "He's the only one that would take a child who would possibly not make it."
The work is exactly what you might imagine, and worse.
Many of these children arrive without names. Their parents, overwhelmed by devastating diagnoses, leave them at hospitals. The paperwork simply reads: "Baby Boy" or "Baby Girl."
Mohamed names them.
"Their families don't name them," he explains. "I name them. I give them names."
He gives them something else, too. Something more important than any medical treatment.
He gives them a family.
When a baby girl with a severe brain malformation arrived at Mohamed's home at seven weeks old, doctors said she would live only months. She was blind, deaf, and paralyzed. She could not speak or move her arms and legs.
But she could feel.
So Mohamed held her. He rocked her through seizures. He slept on the couch beside her so he could respond instantly if she struggled or choked during the night. He talked to her constantly, even knowing she could not hear.
"I know she can't hear, can't see, but I always talk to her," he says. "She has feelings. She has a soul. She's a human being."
She lived not for months, but for years under his care, eventually passing away on the morning of her ninth birthday.
Over more than three decades, Mohamed has cared for over eighty children. Ten have died while in his care. Each loss devastates him.
"I consider them as my biological kids," he says, his voice breaking. "I never think about them as foster kids. And it really gives me great joy when I see them laughing and see a smile in their face."
But Mohamed's own life has been far from easy.
In 1997, he and Dawn had their only biological son, Adam, who was born with dwarfism and osteogenesis imperfecta, commonly called brittle bone disease. Adam has broken nearly every bone in his body. Something as simple as leaning on his elbow can cause a fracture. He cannot walk. Mohamed modified the entire house to accommodate him, replacing carpet with wood floors and fashioning a makeshift wheelchair from an ironing board and roller-skate wheels.
Then tragedy struck again.
Around 2000, Dawn began suffering severe seizures that would leave her incapacitated for days. Her condition worsened over the years, straining their marriage and their mission. In 2015, she passed away.
Mohamed was alone.
A year later, doctors diagnosed him with colon cancer.
"I had no family with me and I was scared," he recalls. "I felt what the kids feel. They are alone. If I am sixty-two and I am scared, what about them?"
His own brush with mortality deepened his resolve. After successful surgery, he returned to his mission with renewed purpose.
"This operation has humbled me," he says. "It makes me work more and help more kids."
Mohamed receives about sixteen hundred dollars a month from Los Angeles County for his foster care work, barely enough to cover basic expenses. In 2017, after the Los Angeles Times published his story, a stranger set up a GoFundMe campaign on his behalf. It has raised over six hundred thousand dollars, money he has used for a new roof, air conditioning, and essential medical equipment for the children.
He receives no salary. He seeks no recognition.
When asked why he does this work, knowing the heartbreak that inevitably follows, his answer is simple.
"They need somebody to love them. I tell them, 'It will be okay. I am here for you. We will go through this together.'"
Mohamed's faith as a Muslim is central to his purpose. "My religion requires me, if I can help any human being, I have to help," he explains. In an era when immigrants and Muslims face widespread suspicion, his story stands as a quiet but powerful testament to the truth of who he is.
"I've been told that my story has touched others and built their belief in humanity again," he says. "That it's changed their perspective of Muslim-Americans. I like to think of it as true Islam. It is about love and compassion and sympathy for others."
Today, Mohamed continues his vigil in the same modest house in Azusa where it all began. His plan for the future is the same as it has always been: to be there for the next child who needs him.
"I will do it as long as I am healthy," he says. "Somebody has to do it."
In a world that often looks away from suffering, Mohamed Bzeek leans in. He holds the children others abandon. He names the nameless. He loves the ones deemed unlovable.
And when their time comes, as it always does, he ensures that no child dies alone.
"There is always good in this world," Mohamed says quietly. "More than the bad. Always."
Some heroes do not wear capes. They wear the exhaustion of sleepless nights. They carry the weight of grief that never fully lifts. They show up, again and again, for children who will never be able to thank them.
Mohamed Bzeek shows up.
Every single time.
