Fort Worth-area mom suspected of lying about daughter’s illness that prompted surgery
A woman lied to doctors about her 6-year-old daughter being sick in a suspected medical abuse case in Tarrant County, according to a law enforcement investigation.
Melanie Lynn Pryor was charged on May 21 with endangering a child. Pryor, who lives in North Richland Hills, told multiple Fort Worth doctors that her daughter had a high fever, vomiting and diarrhea, authorities said. The child had a colonoscopy and endoscopy in November but was never actually sick, according to an arrest warrant for Pryor.
Cook Children’s Medical Center doctors suspected Pryor was lying about the daughter’s illness after multiple hospital visits in November, and doctors filed a child abuse report. A Child Protective Services case worker called a Tarrant County investigator about the report.
According to Detective Michael Weber’s investigation, Pryor took her daughter to the hospital four times in November and told doctors she had had a 103-degree fever for four days. While in the hospital each time, the child never had a fever. After Pryor continued to insist her daughter had stomach issues, a gastroenterologist scheduled a colonoscopy and endoscopy. The test results were normal for both.
On one of Pryor’s visit, a doctor gave the child a cheese stick to eat. She ate most of the cheese stick and left the room. Her mother came back shortly after with a bag of what appeared to be cheese mixed with water. Pryor said it was her child’s vomit. The doctor started to suspect that Pryor was faking her daughter’s illness in what is referred to as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
In Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, experts say caregivers often exaggerate or create medical symptoms in a child to gain attention.
Weber analyzed Pryor’s doctor visits and noticed a pattern, according to the arrest warrant. Pryor would go to the hospital, say the child had a fever and other symptoms and ask for meal bags, vouchers and gift cards. She would give inconsistent medical histories for her daughter during the visits, which sometimes lasted several days.
In one visit, she specifically said she did not want anyone to mention Munchausen by proxy or for anyone to think she was hurting her daughter, even though no one at the hospital had brought it up.
In February, Pryor was arrested on an unrelated theft warrant. Weber went to the Tarrant County’s Sheriff Office and started to talk with Pryor about her child’s alleged illness. Pryor said she faked her daughter’s illness in the most recent hospital stay, but said she had not done so on other visits, according to the arrest warrant. She agreed to give medical power for her daughter over to a family member, saying, “I did this to myself,” according to the warrant.
In a follow-up interrogation on April 30, Pryor admitted she faked her daughter’s vomit and lied about her fever multiple times, the warrant says. She said she did this to find a place to stay because several shelters in Fort Worth turned her and her daughter away because they were out of room. However, when Weber interviewed the shelters’ officials and analyzed records, he found the shelters had open beds when Pryor took her daughter to the hospital.
Pryor also told nurses she had an apartment, and a CPS worker went to her home in North Richland Hills in January.
In an affidavit about the child’s colonoscopy surgery, a doctor at Cook Children’s said there was ”inherent risk with anesthesia and the procedures including bleeding, infection, and reaction to anesthetic that could be, in an extreme circumstance, life threatening.”
“(The child) is a victim of abuse by Ms. Pryor and her health and life were endangered by Ms. Pryor’s falsifications,” the affidavit said.
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy has increasingly come into the public eye in the past few years. In 2015, the Star-Telegram published a three-month examination of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy cases in Tarrant County.
In Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy cases, doctors — dependent on the parent’s description of what’s going on with the child — sometimes perform unneeded and painful tests, procedures and surgeries. Some people diagnosed with MSP were physically, emotionally or sexually abused when they were children, experts say.
This story was originally published May 28, 2020 at 3:49 PM.
