NYC Mom of 2 Dies After Illegal Butt Implant Surgery

• New York City mom of two María Paz Peñaloza has died after complications from an apparently illegal butt implant surgery left her brain dead
• The mom went to a private home in Queens to have her butt implants removed
• She died from lidocaine toxicity, the New York Daily News reports, and now her family is raising money to travel to America to say goodbye

A New York City mom has died after complications from a butt implant surgery performed in a Queens home left her brain dead — and the man who allegedly performed it was arrested after attempting to flee to the airport.

María Paz Peñaloza, 31, went to Felipe Hoyos-Foronda’s private home in Astoria, Queens, in March to have her implants removed, her family told the New York Daily News.  “She went there because a friend had already gone there for an operation and recommended him,” her sister, Linney Peñaloza Cabrera, told the outlet, explaining in Spanish that a friend who went with Peñaloza to have the butt implants removed said she was taken away from the home in an ambulance.

“From the time the ambulance came and while she was in the hospital, [doctors] were trying to revive her for two-and-a-half hours,” Cabrera, 34, told the outlet.

The mom of two boys, aged 3 and 1, was taken off a ventilator and two weeks later, died, the result of lidocaine toxicity, the outlet reports. Lidocaine is the most commonly used local anesthetic, but too much of it can cause seizures, coma, cardiac complications, and death, the National Library of Medicine explains. 

First responders on the scene called the police, who apprehended Hoyos-Foronda at John F. Kennedy International Airport, where he was trying to board a flight, CBS News said.

The NYDN reports that he told police he was licensed in Colombia. Police said he didn’t have a license to practice medicine in the U.S. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of assault in the second degree and unauthorized practice of profession. 

A GoFundMe has been established to help her family in Colombia travel to the U.S. to “say goodbye to María Paz with dignity.”

“Maria was a very happy person, very family oriented,” Cabrera told the NYDN. “She always wanted to be around us at her home. We’d always spend the holidays at her place.”

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