06/17/2026
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Beautiful
In a four-bedroom house in Azusa, California, in the eastern part of the San Gabriel Valley, a seventy-one-year-old Libyan-born American named Mohamed Bzeek lives with his adult son and, at any given time, with one or more children in the final months or weeks of their lives.
He is the only foster parent in Los Angeles County who has chosen, as his specific institutional role, to care exclusively for terminally ill children whom the rest of the system cannot place.
He has been doing it for thirty years.
He has fostered approximately eighty children. Ten of them have died in his home. He has buried them, one by one, at a Muslim cemetery near his house. He visits the graves.
When asked, in interview after interview across the past decade, how he is able to do this work, he gives the same answer.
He says he is doing it because his faith requires him to.
He had not come to the United States to do any of this. He had come in 1978 from Tripoli, Libya, to study electronic engineering. He had expected, like most international students of his generation, that he would finish his degree, find professional work, and build the kind of American life that the system had described to him.
He met Dawn Mellon in the 1980s.
Dawn had been a foster parent in Los Angeles County since the early 1980s. Her own grandparents had been foster parents. She had grown up in a household built around the idea that taking in children who had nowhere else to go was something a person did. By the time she met Mohamed, she had been doing foster work for years.
They married in 1989. Mohamed joined her in the foster work that same year.
At first they took in children with the usual range of foster-care needs — abandonment, abuse, neglect. Over time, as they became known in the county system for accepting children with complex medical conditions, the placements they received began to skew toward the hardest cases. By 1995, six years after they had started together, they made a decision.
They would take only the dying ones.
The children that came to them after that had names like the children who came to any foster home. Some could see; some could not. Some could hear; some could not. Some were on ventilators. Some had genetic conditions the medical literature understood in detail and could do almost nothing about. Some lived with the Bzeeks for years. Some lived for weeks. Some did not last the night.
Mohamed took every one of them to Children's Hospital Los Angeles for treatment. He learned how to operate the equipment. He kept a medical bed permanently set up in his house. He kept a soft light on at night.
Dawn died in the mid-2010s. Mohamed continued the work alone.
He has had health issues of his own. He underwent surgery for colorectal cancer in December 2016. He recovered. He went back to the work. His biological son, Adam, born in 1997, has osteogenesis imperfecta — brittle bone disease — and lives with Mohamed and requires significant ongoing care himself. Adam is now an adult. He has spent his entire life in the same household as the foster children his parents cared for.
In February 2017, the Los Angeles Times ran a feature about Mohamed by the reporter Hailey Branson-Potts. The piece was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It introduced him to a national and international audience. Children's Hospital Los Angeles ran their own profile of him later that year, calling him the Father of Last Resort. He has been interviewed by major outlets in dozens of countries. A 2018 documentary called Guardian of Angels was made about his work. A GoFundMe campaign launched after the Los Angeles Times feature raised more than half a million dollars to support the household.
He has continued, since then, exactly as he was. He does not present what he does as exceptional. He says, in the documented record of his many interviews, that his Muslim faith requires him to help people who cannot help themselves, that the children who come to him need someone to hold them, that the work is what God has asked him to do, and that he is doing it.
The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services has confirmed, across multiple interviews over the past decade, that he is the only foster parent in the county dedicated specifically to terminally ill children — that without him, the children who have lived in his home would have died in institutions, alone.
He has buried ten of them. He visits the graves at the Muslim cemetery near his house. He has said, in interview after interview, that he does not see the work as painful, because he does not see love as something that produces pain.
He has called the children he buries his sons and his daughters.
He is seventy-one. He is still doing the work.
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