Sally Freeman; Foster Mother and Her Husband Took In Hundreds of Children

Sally Freeman, a foster mother who cared for more than 270 neglected and abandoned children, many of them with serious disabilities, died Thursday at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Woodland Hills. She was 63 and died of a rare blood disorder.

Freeman and her husband, Jerry, became foster parents in 1967, providing emergency shelter to children who had been deserted by their parents or were waiting for openings in the juvenile welfare system.

By the early 1980s, they were taking in children who had severe medical and developmental problems, including cerebral palsy and mental retardation. The Freemans were nominated twice as Los Angeles County’s foster parents of the year.

Freeman helped train new foster parents and was serving her second year as president of the Tri-Valley Foster Parent Alliance.

Her Canoga Park home was one of about 60 in the county that was able to care for severely disabled children. The Freemans became legal guardians of two such children: Jacob, 8, who was born with trisomy, a chromosomal disorder that causes physical deformities and delays mental growth; and Manny, 5, who has cerebral palsy because of his mother’s drug use and a stroke during pregnancy.

Freeman was a Los Angeles native and graduate of Dorsey High School. After attending Los Angeles City College, she worked as a medical assistant. She quit after marrying her husband, who runs a wholesale egg business.

Soon after they were married, their first child, Jeff, was born. When he was about 1, they became foster parents because, as Freeman told The Times in an interview last year, “We just love children very much.”

Within a few years they adopted two children: Melissa, now 31, and Alycia, now 30. They have four children in all, including Jeff, 36, and Tammy, 27, and four grandchildren.

Among their nearly 300 foster children were many who were given little hope for survival, but who learned to walk, feed themselves and go to school because of the Freemans’ help.

Along the way, Freeman became an expert at cutting through red tape, undaunted by bureaucratic obstacles that stood in the way of the best care she could provide for the children.

Jerry Freeman recalls trying to register one of their foster charges in school but being turned away when he was told she first needed a medical evaluation, a process that involves assembling a panel of experts and normally takes about three weeks. Sally Freeman did not want the girl, then 8, to miss so much education. She got on the phone and within a few hours convinced the officials to conduct the evaluation that afternoon.

“Her advocacy for kids was unreal,” Jerry Freeman said.

She was diagnosed in November 1999 with microvasculitis, a rare blood disease that inflames and weakens small blood vessels in the body, and was told she had only three months to live. Her illness caused partial amputation of a finger, bouts of pneumonia and other infections.

A memorial service will be held Monday at 11 a.m. in the chapel at Eden Memorial Park, 11500 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Mission Hills. Donations may be made to the Tri-Valley Foster Parents Alliance, 22348 Haynes St., Canoga Park, CA 91303, or to Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles.