A Texas grandmother has been accused of poisoning her seven-year-old granddaughter by injecting Mean Green Degreaser into her feeding tube.
Detectives allege Lisa Campbell-Goins, 56, made the young girl sick to fabricate an illness that required extensive medication and treatment, police said. Home page of the big country.
Meanwhile, the grandmother defrauded Medicaid and raked in hundreds, if not thousands, of Good Samaritans on GoFundMe.
Police say she has cared for the young girl since she was a baby because her birth mother was unable to care for her.
Campbell-Goins claimed that at the age of seven months the child fell and hit her head, causing a movement disorder called dystonia. But investigators later concluded the child suffered only minor injuries.
Still, she was hospitalized 17 different times between January 2021 and her last stay at Cook Children’s Medical Center in August 2023, when Campbell-Goins claimed she had severe dehydration, vomiting and diarrhea. according to Law & Crime.
Doctors quickly determined that the victim had ulcers in her gastrointestinal tract and damage to her colon and lower intestines, and eventually gave her a stomach tube to administer medication. Court documents obtained by KDFW also state that the grandmother pushed doctors to feed her through the tube as well.
But medical professionals were baffled as the “disease presentation was not consistent with a known medical diagnosis” and failed to respond to treatment, leaving the girl hospitalized for months, a police statement said.
Lisa Campbell-Goins, 56, has been arrested for allegedly poisoning her seven-year-old granddaughter
Police say she gave the impression that the young girl had an illness that required extensive medication and treatment
In January 2024, another family member said she was concerned that the child’s symptoms may have been caused by poison in the child’s feeding tube.
She raised concerns about a bottle of nail polish remover left with the child before she was admitted to hospital – noting that Campbell-Goins did not have any painted nails.
Multiple family members also told investigators they saw the grandmother administering Benadryl and melatonin through the young girl’s feeding tube, claiming Campbell-Goins had been giving her medications since she began caring for the child.
When police began investigating, they learned that Campbell-Goins did not actually have legal custody of the girl, and had her removed from the hospital.
Since then, the child has made major improvements in her behavior, her ability to get around and her ability to eat and drink by mouth, court documents show.
The gastrointestinal problems that Campbell-Goins originally brought her granddaughter to the hospital for also resolved and the girl was taken off her numerous medications.
One of the girl’s doctors later told police “that after the suspect was removed from the hospital, the victim made almost immediate progress, was able to come off many psychiatric medications and no longer had unexplained diarrhea,” according to court records documents.
Another reportedly ‘stated that he can count on one hand the number of times he has seen a child so sick when the victim gets better, because all that is done by medical professionals is ending interventions and reducing care,” noting that abuse was suspected in all other cases. .
Ultimately, state doctors concluded that the child’s symptoms could be explained by alkaline poisoning – which could have resulted from the nail polish remover or bottles of Mean Green Degreaser found in the girl’s hospital room.
The young girl was hospitalized 17 different times between January 2021 until her last stay at Cook Children’s Medical Center in August 2023
Court documents also allege that Campbell-Goins insisted that doctors at the hospital use an enclosed tent-shaped bed, which nurses claimed they saw the grandmother use “as punishment” for behavior she didn’t like.
The girl lay in that bed off and on for days, weeks or even a month between her admission to hospital in August 2023 and the time the police started their investigation in January 2024.
She is now in the custody of her maternal grandmother, and court documents show her feeding tube has been removed, she has gained weight and her gastrostomy has been closed.
The girl is now taking food and medications by mouth without any problems, police said, and she is showing no abnormal behavioral problems.
She is also attending school for the first time, where court documents show she is excelling socially, but is being monitored to determine if she has a learning disability due to a learning disability or because she has not had formal education before.
Because of the drastic improvements, state doctors determined that the child’s conditions were “consistent with a fabricated illness” and that the child was most likely the “unfortunate victim of medical child abuse.”
Police also say Campbell-Goins caused $600,000 in Medicaid fraud due to the unnecessary treatments and hospitalizations while raising money through online fundraisers.
The child is now in the custody of her maternal grandmother. Police say she has made major improvements in her behavior, her ability to get around and her ability to eat and drink by mouth.
But this is reportedly not the first time Campbell-Goins has done something like this.
Her stepson told investigators that she faked his symptoms when he was a teenager so that he would take higher ADHD medications, claiming that she would also give him some of his father’s medications.
‘[The stepson] stated that he was taking a variety of medications,” according to court documents.
‘[He] stated that he knew he didn’t need that much medication and that he was “on the verge of hallucinating and seeing things.”
Campbell-Goins even came under official investigation by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services in 1999, when she was caught telling doctors that her son had vomited at the hospital, even though he didn’t.
Her then-husband also told police at the time that he had come to believe Campbell-Goins was causing her son’s illness and overmedicating him.
However, the investigation ended when Campbell-Goins took parenting classes.
She told police she had also been tested for Munchhausen by proxy at the time, but claimed she had not.