A woman died early Tuesday after she was dumped at a Bronx hospital half naked — and doctors suspect she was the victim of a botched butt lift injection, police sources said.
Two mystery women are being sought after they drove 53-year-old Maxine Messam to Jacobi Medical Center in her own BMW SUV and then walked off, leaving the vehicle behind early Tuesday.
“We don’t know what happened,” the victim’s shocked husband Carlos Simpson told the Daily News, speaking outside the family’s home in Bridgeport, Conn. “She was at work and she left work. So we don’t know what happened from there.”
Police got involved when the hospital called 911 at 1:51 a.m., shortly after the woman died.
Messam, who was naked from the waist down when she was left at the hospital, had needle marks on her body and doctors found a foreign substance had been injected into her buttocks.
The two women who dropped her off cast themselves as Good Samaritans to hospital staff before taking off, claiming they found her in distress at Woodlawn Cemetery and wanted to help her, police said.
“Everybody is really emotionally damaged at this point in time,” said Messam’s son, who declined to give his name. “I would like to say something, but we don’t have all the details.”
An autopsy will determine Messam’s cause of death.
There have been multiple cases in recent years in which women unable to afford the price charged by legitimate plastic surgeons have turned to scammers pretending to be licensed and offering dangerous enhancements at a discount.
In June 2018, Leslie Ayala died from an illegal buttocks injection. Cops said Ayala visited the city from Philadelphia for the risky procedure. She went into cardiac arrest at the home of a friend she was staying with on Seward Ave. in Castle Hill.
A year earlier, a Harlem mom who underwent buttock enhancement surgery died nearly two weeks later. Latesha Bynum’s family and lawyer said the 31-year-old woman went to a shady clinic on July 15, 2017, to get silicone injections from someone claiming to be a doctor.
Kevin Richardson, the phony physician who performed Bynum’s procedure, pleaded guilty to charges that included second-degree manslaughter and unauthorized practice of a profession. He was sentenced to up to 12 years in jail.
The botched butt job sent Bynum, 31, into a coma, and two weeks later she died.
Richardson fled New York when he learned the back-alley work at his Gramercy Park clinic led to Bynum’s death.
Prosecutors said the fake doc used a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts as his waiting room. There, a “nurse,” Allison Spence, 44, would meet patients and escort them to the apartment for their silicone injection sessions.
Copyright © 2021, New York Daily News
Copyright © 2021, New York Daily News