To hear Kelly Mayhew’s loving family and friends tell it, the stunning 34-year-old never needed anything to make her more perfect than she already was.
“Very beautiful. Very,” was a former beau’s tender description.
But the young woman was always fretting about plumping up her backside. “She would say to me, ‘I want things to fit right,’” said Mayhew’s ex-boyfriend, remembering one of many moments when Mayhew’s self-doubt got the better of her and she could see nothing but flaws. “I would talk to her, but she continued to say her clothes don’t fit the way her body was shaped.”
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It was around 2008 when Mayhew first experimented with augmenting her body. Unsatisfied with her derriere, she decided to expand it. “It was the same [procedure] to get her buttocks bigger,” the ex said. “But the first one she had was [performed by] a real doctor.”
Mayhew would go on to undergo several more of these procedures, skipping the comforts of a clinic on at least the last attempt in favor of a seedy basement in Far Rockaway, Queens.
It turned out to be a fatally flawed decision. The procedure went wrong. Mayhew is now dead. And the plastic surgeon fled after shooting up the aspiring career mom with silicone injections.
But the fugitive doc isn’t likely to run far for too long, one police source said. “It’s only a matter of time. She’s not your run of the mill-type criminal.”
Mayhew had made the seven-hour drive to Far Rockaway, New York, from her hometown of Suitland, Maryland, in order to get an even better behind and ultimately save bundles of cash. A legit butt lift can run to more than $4,500.
With her mom as her traveling companion, the 34-year-old platform producer at BET in Washington, D.C., thought she would be safe Saturday. That, however, soon turned out to be a miscalculation when she met with an unidentified doc who had over time turned a dank basement inside a two-family A-frame home on Dickens Street into a makeshift operating room.
The shady surgical procedure involved Mayhew lying “face down” on a gurney and the female doctor administering the backside-boosting procedure.
After three injections, things went bad. Fast. Mayhew apparently went into cardiac arrest and struggled to breathe, and began experiencing violent convulsions, according to multiple law-enforcement sources.
Her mother then attempted to give her daughter CPR—with no success.
With her daughter dying in front of her on the basement operating table, Mayhew’s mother dialed 911. It was just before 7 p.m. when the medics arrived, and that’s when Mayhew’s “surgeon” vanished. “She fled after [Emergency Medical Services] arrived,” the police source confirmed.
Mayhew’s mother, who asked that her name be withheld, was beside herself Tuesday when tracking back what happened and being forced to deal with the loss of her daughter.
Kelly, she said, was her firstborn and helped raise her two brothers and two sisters. “She was my oldest child,” Mayhew’s mom told The Daily Beast in a phone interview from a family member’s Maryland home. “And she wanted to have children of her own.”
Mayhew was rushed to St. John’s Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Cops are still pursuing the shady syringe suspect.
And it remains unclear whether Mayhew’s death was a homicide after an autopsy came back inconclusive, according to a spokeswoman for the city’s medical examiner’s office.
Black market butt injections are putting more and more women in harm’s way. Even former Miss Argentina Solange Magnano died after trying to better her backside. And with a whopping 10,000 of the procedures being performed every year (many illicitly), more and more funerals are taking place.
Mayhew idolized Beyoncé, loved cartoons (her favorites were Disney characters and Shrek), and was a dedicated businesswoman. “Kelly was the beloved of the family,” her mom said. “She loved her job at BET and she had a heart of gold.”
But on Tuesday Mayhew’s mom was forced to cut the phone chat with The Daily Beast short to work out her daughter’s funeral arrangements.
Upon hearing that his love of 15 years had passed away in such a grave and grim fashion, the ex, who also requested anonymity, began welling up. “I don’t know what was going on in her mind,” he said. “All I know is she was beautiful and she was fine the way she was.”
Mayhew’s ex-boyfriend is left only to guess at what convinced the beauty she needed to keep trying to change her body. “We will never know what she was thinking because she is not here anymore,” he said. “I guess people get caught up in today’s world and they are not happy with themselves, and they just want to change it. [Kelly] was like that.”
And after hearing about the doctor, who is on the lam somewhere while Mayhew’s mother is making funeral arrangements, the ex is angry. “They got to catch whoever did this,” he said.
The landlord, Joan Doyle, whose Far Rockaway home doubled as a butt-lifting parlor, admitted she was suspicious of the parade of young gals coming and going after she allowed a tenant to take an upstairs flat over a year ago.
“I thought something was going on. Too much women were coming back and forth,” Doyle told DNAinfo.
Doyle added that the women walking in and out were carrying some extra weight. “Some of [the women] had weird butts,” she said.
Mayhew’s ex admitted there must be something ugly in our culture that is causing this quest for larger rear ends. “I guess people get caught up in wanting something more than they have,” he said. “They’re not happy with themselves whenever they see others… I never approved of it, but that’s what she wanted to do.”
