NEW YORK (AP) — A New York City man has been charged with performing medical procedures without a license after a patient was left near death during a botched butt-implant removal procedure in his home, prosecutors and law enforcement officials said Thursday.
Felipe Hoyos-Foronda injected the 31-year-old woman with the local anesthetic lidocaine, causing her to go into cardiac arrest on March 28, according to a criminal complaint.
The woman was taken from Hoyos-Foronda's Queens home to a hospital, where a doctor said she is not expected to survive, the filing said.
The victim, who has not been named, “has no brain activity” and shows evidence of lidocaine toxicity, the doctor said.
Hoyos-Foronda, 38, was apprehended at JFK International Airport attempting to board a flight, authorities said.
Prosecutors said he was arraigned Sunday on charges of assault and unauthorized practice of a profession and was held without bail.
His lawyer didn't respond to email and phone messages seeking comment Thursday.
Hoyos-Foronda promoted a range of cosmetic procedures on his TikTok account, where he also sometimes identified himself as a doctor.
One recent post touts his prices for Botox, lip fillers and body sculpting. Another post shows him using a machine on a woman that he claims, in text written in Spanish, as a “safe and painless method" to shape one's glutes, or butt muscles. Other posts suggest he also offered his services in Miami.
Earlier this year, a Manhattan aesthetician was charged with injecting customers with counterfeit Botox at his medical spa after some of them complained that it made them sick.
In 2018, a Manhattan man posing as a doctor was sentenced to up to 12 years in jail after pleading guilty in the death of a woman during a botched silicone butt-implant procedure.
In 2015, a former madam who performed illegal “body sculpting” in the Philadelphia area was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison after the death of a dancer whose heart stopped after nearly half a gallon of silicone was injected into her buttocks.
The Associated Press
