Rogue ‘beauty treatments’ claim victims from Salinas to Miami.

Maria Olivia Aguirre-Castillo was in search of beauty. The Castroville woman could have opted for a nip here, a tuck there, perhaps a little Botox to get rid of the expression lines in her brow. Her butt, she seemed to think, needed a little plumping. At 46, she might have felt the years creeping up on her.

In her mind, at least, there was work to be done. And so, investigators say, on the morning of November 17, 2005, Aguirre-Castillo met with “a friend” in Castroville for some help.

The friend wasn’t a plastic surgeon, not someone who could have safely put silicone implants into Aguirre-Castillo’s buttocks or harvested fat from one area of her body and injected it where she wanted it. The friend wasn’t even a doctor. Or a nurse. But that didn’t stop Aguirre-Castillo.

Monterey County Sheriffs Department detectives say Aguirre-Castillo was injected multiple times into the folds of skin where the top of each thigh meets the buttocks with a syringe filled with some kind of filler, leaving multiple half-inch red bruises on her butt.

Though final test results were not available at press time, preliminary reports say the substance was Mazola corn oil, the same kind of cooking oil found in grocery stores everywhere and used in kitchens every day. The injections left multiple cyst-like lumps of thick gelatinous goop embedded deep into the skin of her buttocks.

Around 10am, according to investigators, Aguirre-Castillo was back at her Castroville home, where she began to feel the effects of the injected grease. She was hot, dizzy, and extremely thirsty. She then became confused and disoriented. Aguirre-Castillo fell to the floor and began convulsing.

American Medical Response responded to Aguirre-Castillo’s home and began life-saving procedures, then transported her to Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital (SVMH).

Once at SVMH, resuscitation procedures continued. For a week, Aguirre-Castillo remained comatose in the Intensive Care Unit, unaffected by her doctors’ efforts. Physicians ran blood tests, CT scans, EKGs. The areas around her heart, brain and chest cavity had become dumping grounds for excess fluid. Her lungs became swollen and engorged with pasty yellowy liquid.

Then, just before 2pm on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 24, 2005, Aguirre-Castillo’s heart stopped beating, she stopped breathing, and she was pronounced dead. The coroner’s report attributes her death to “multiple organ failure due to systematic fat embolization due to massive subcutaneous fat necrosis due to injection of foreign material into buttocks.”

Dr. James Wells, the immediate past president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, did not treat Aguirre-Castillo, but he has read the Monterey County Coroner’s findings. He’s been board certified in plastic surgery since 1978, and before going into private practice in Long Beach, he taught at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is currently a professor of plastic surgery at the University of California Irvine.

“Basically what happened was, after she was injected, the substance moved into her blood stream and then traveled throughout her body, affecting multiple organs like the lungs, brain and kidney, and there was no going back,” he says “That’s how she died.”

In the Monterey County Coroner’s Annual Report for 2005, Aguirre-Castillo’s manner of death was found to be an “accident.” The death was categorized as a “therapeutic misadventure.”