A Connecticut woman is dead after what doctors believe was a butt-enhancement injection that went terribly wrong, according to police.
Maxine Messam, 53, died early Tuesday morning after being dropped off at a Bronx hospital by two unidentified women who are now being sought by detectives, an NYPD spokesman confirmed to The Daily Beast.
The pair drove Messam, who was naked from the waist down, to Jacobi Medical Center in her own BMW SUV before walking away from the scene, the New York Daily News reported. Doctors told the outlet that doctors found needle marks on Messam’s body and said that “a foreign substance had been injected into her buttocks.”
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Messam died shortly before 2 a.m., and the hospital called 911.
The two women reportedly told hospital staff a "different story that had nothing to do with butt injections,” the NYPD spokesman told The Daily Beast.
According to the News, the women portrayed themselves as “good samaritans” who happened upon Messam “in distress at Woodlawn Cemetery and wanted to help her.”
Messam lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and worked for the state’s Department of Developmental Services, public records say.
“We don’t know what happened,” Messam’s husband told the News. “She was at work and she left work. So we don’t know what happened from there.”
Messam’s son echoed that statement, saying he had no details of his mother’s death and describing the family as “really emotionally damaged at this point in time.”
A butt lift can cost upward of $5,000, while backroom procedures—in which untrained practitioners have reportedly been known to seal incisions with Krazy Glue—can be had for less than $1,000.
In 2019, an unlicensed beautician pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide in the death of a 34-year-old Maryland woman who died after a botched butt injection in a Queens basement. The silicone gel used in the deadly procedure had been purchased on eBay, Acting District Attorney John M. Ryan said at the time.
That same year, a 43-year-old Philadelphia woman died after a black market butt injection performed at an apartment in the Bronx.
In September, a Los Angeles mother-daughter team were arrested and charged with murder after 26-year-old Karissa Rajpaul died from what police called an “outlaw buttocks augmentation procedure.”
