For Kayla Elliot, the initial warning sign appeared with a Facebook message inviting her to sign up with an unfamiliar surrogacy agency located in southern California.
The mother of four from Texas had been browsing surrogacy chat groups, expressing her desire to help a couple without children by becoming a surrogate, saying, “I really enjoy being pregnant.”
Although she found it odd that Mark Surrogacy Investment LLC contacted her directly, her limited experience with surrogacy agencies — responsible for connecting women with prospective parents — led her to proceed with the opportunity.
She did notice it was a little strange that the organization said they had already chosen a Chinese couple to be the parents of the baby she would eventually sign up to carry.
“I didn’t have enough knowledge,” said Elliot in a YouTube interview posted earlier this month by the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, a California nonprofit whose mission is to inform the public about ethical issues surrounding biomedicine and biotechnology.
“I didn’t know [that as a surrogate], you’re supposed to choose your family.”
Unbeknownst to her, the family she was carrying the baby for was already a large one. A house in an upmarket Los Angeles city was raided by the FBI, leading authorities to rescue 21 small children, many of whom had allegedly been subject to abuse.
Doctors realized the injuries had occurred around two days previously, sparking a police investigation.
After obtaining a search warrant, detectives seized security cameras from inside the home which allegedly showed the hospitalized children being hit and violently shaken by a nanny, Chunmei Li, on May 5, resulting in the baby losing consciousness.
Other children in the couple’s care were abused emotionally and physically by at least six nannies, according to NBC, citing law enforcement sources.
Police rescued 15 children from the sprawling 10,000 square foot home in Arcadia, California, an affluent community known as the ‘Chinese Beverly Hills’.
“We discovered numerous children ranging in ages from 2 months old to 13 years old,” Arcadia police Lt. Kollin Cieadlo said. “Many of the children were birthed through surrogacy and then the male and female at the residence took legal guardianship of those kids.”
One neighbor said the house was set up like a hotel, with multiple ensuite rooms and a front desk run by an attendant, per CBS.
Another six children belonging to the couple had been moved out of the mansion but were located by authorities. Police told local outlets Zhang was able to show that she is the legal mother on all of their birth certificates.
“We believe one or two were born biologically to the mother. There are some surrogates who have come forward and said they were surrogates for the children,” said Cieadlo.
Seventeen of the 21 are under three, according to local reports. They have all now in the care of the Department of Children and Family Services.
The Chinese-born couple said they had wanted to have as many children as possible because of Xuan’s advancing age.
However, while in their care “the discipline, both verbal and physical, was severe,” added Cieadlo, who said they immediately called the FBI in to help investigate.
Two companies registered to the address of the $4 million property — Mark Surrogacy Investment and Future Spring Surrogacy — are no longer active, according to California business records.
Kallie Fell, executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, said the situation bares the hallmarks of a trafficking scheme.
“Everyone’s spidey senses should go up. The danger of the fertility industry is that it is unregulated. Anyone can open an agency. The problem is way bigger than this small story.”
In China, where infertility rates are high, surrogacy and the sale of human eggs are illegal, which is why many moneyed Chinese couples come to the US to contract surrogates to carry their babies, paying as much as $100,000 to rent a womb, according to a report.
Police are still looking for Li, the nanny, who remains a suspect, with an arrest warrant issued, while Xuan and Zhang have been released without charges being filed at this point.
A text message credited to Xuan by local media claimed “any accusations of wrongdoing are misguided and wrong.”
Six women have come forward to say they had babies for the couple, according to KTLA news. One surrogate in the Los Angeles area said she gave birth in March, while another had babies in 2022 and 2024 for them.
A third woman in Florida, ‘Perla’, 31, said she went through a pregnancy for the couple but the baby was stillborn.
“I think what hurt me the most was that I feel like the baby was abandoned—and I was too,” she told KTLA.
Shockingly, one surrogate in Pennsylvania and another in Virgina, who both asked to remain anonymous citing privacy issues, are both currently pregnant with children for the couple, according to the station.
For Elliot, there were other red flags involved with the birth of her surrogate baby — a girl born in March in Texas.
When she showed up for the embryo transfer in California — one of 15 US states where compensated surrogacy is legal — she was surprised to meet an elderly man who she was told was the father, who had provided his sperm along with eggs from a donor.
She was told the mother had “a stomach bug” and didn’t want to infect Elliot.
Fell said this is the same story repeated to other women who had acted as surrogates for Mark Surrogacy. Like Elliot, they never met the mother, Fell told The Post Thursday.
Another red flag surfaced a few days after the birth of the baby girl when a young Chinese woman showed up to collect her. Elliot found it strange that the woman had no sense of joy and didn’t even come equipped with a baby car seat for the child.
“Usually, you are overjoyed to meet your child, but there was nothing like that,” said Fell, adding Elliot’s family then “drove the woman to the airport with the baby, because she seemed totally lost.”
Fell also told how the woman handed $200 to Elliot’s and each of her children, who were in the hospital room.
Fell said it’s not clear how much Elliot was paid to carry the child, but had told her that it was “at the lower end” of the pay scale for the service, which ranges anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000, Fell said.
As for Elliot, she was so distressed with the situation that she started a GoFundMe campaign to “seek legal placement of the baby girl I delivered as a surrogate.”
The child, along with the 20 other children rescued by police, has been placed in foster care.
“The little one deserves stability, love and a safe home,” she wrote. “I am prepared and deeply committed to providing that for her, but the legal process to secure placement is complex and costly.”
So far, the campaign has raised just over $7,000.
Cieadlo says the FBI and his detectives are now working to “see the origins of where these children were all born, contact those surrogate mothers, see what the backstory is on that,” adding the investigation will cover the rest of the country and possibly become international.
