A Texas grandmother has been been arrested on charges authorities say stem from a case of Munchausen by proxy.
Lisa Campbell-Goins, aged 56, was taken into custody on Tuesday by the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office for charges including exploiting a child, causing harm to a child, and wrongfully restraining a child.
The charges include having an unnecessary gastric feeding tube placed in the 7-year-old girl.
According to reports from KDFW, an arrest affidavit revealed that Campbell-Goins had been looking after the young girl since she was an infant due to her mother’s inability to do so.
The incident unfolded in August 2023 when the child’s grandmother admitted her to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth due to severe symptoms like dehydration, vomiting, and diarrhea. Medical examinations showed ulcers in her digestive system and injury to her lower intestine and colon, although the symptoms did not align with any known medical condition, as stated in the affidavit.
Doctors said the girl’s condition improved and then worsened. Doctors placed a tube to help administer medications and food, but in January 2024, family members contacted authorities and said they suspected Campbell-Goins was poisoning the child through the tube.
Authorities had the grandmother removed from the hospital, since she wasn’t the child’s legal guardian, and doctors noticed improvements to her condition and her behavior.
Investigators said they believe Campbell-Goins used an alkaline substance, possibly Mean Green Degreaser, to poison the child. They also said they believe the grandmother defrauded Medicare for more than $600,000 in unneeded treatments. And they have asked anyone who may have contributed to a GoFundMe for the girl’s treatment to contact them.
The affidavit also said that Campbell-Goins was accused of medically abusing her son in 1999 and ordered to take parenting classes after she was discovered to overmedicate the boy and lie to doctors about his condition.
Additionally, a stepson told investigators that she lied about his behavior when he was younger, leading to ever-increasing ADHD medications.
“[The stepson] stated that he was on a multitude of different medications. [He] stated that he knew he didn’t need that many medications and was ‘to the point of hallucinating and seeing stuff,’” the affidavit states.
Officials said the little girl is now with her maternal grandmother, no longer has a feeding tube, eats on her own, is gaining weight, and is going to school. She’s being weaned off the unnecessary medications she was taking.
Campbell-Goins is the second arrest in Tarrant County in the past month for suspected Munchausen by proxy. Denise Zamora, 40, was arrested in December for submitting false medical histories for her 15-year-old daughter that led to “unnecessary and potentially harmful medical procedures over a six-year-period” that included insertion of a feeding tube.
