A man accused of killing a young mother while performing an unlicensed operation to remove a butt implant at his Queens apartment pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Thursday, officials said.
The bogus surgeon, Felipe Hoyos-Foronda, 40, is expected to receive a five-to-15-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to performing the deadly medical procedure that claimed the life of María Paz Peñaloza Cabrera on March 28, 2025, Queens prosecutors said.
The 31-year-old victim met Hoyos-Foronda at a makeshift operating room setup inside his 35th St. home near 20th Road in Astoria, where he injected her with lidocaine, a local anesthetic commonly used as a numbing agent during plastic surgery.
But the solution caused Peñaloza Cabrera to suffer lidocaine toxicity, a condition that occurs when excessive amounts of the anesthetic enter the bloodstream, causing seizures, irregular heart rhythm, respiratory failure and — as in the victim’s case — cardiac arrest.
After trying and failing to revive the victim using CPR, Hoyos-Foronda ran to his car and sped to Kennedy Airport.
“I booked the flight while I was driving,” he later told investigators, according to prosecutors. “I was going to go back to Colombia.”
The counterfeit surgeon was waiting for his Starbucks order at JFK when Port Authority cops caught up with him. He later admitted to giving “hundreds” of butt implant injections prior to administering the fatal dose that killed Peñaloza Cabrera, prosecutors said.
“I want him to go to jail. He’s dangerous to the society,” the victim’s mother, Gladys Cabrera, told the Daily News shortly after Hoyos-Foronda’s arrest. “The medicine he gave her killed her. She didn’t deserve this.”
Investigators found the suspect’s car littered with medical waste, including a garbage bag with a bloody syringe, other used syringes, an empty bottle of lidocaine and empty bottles of human growth hormone and other medications, prosecutors said.
Peñaloza Cabrera, the mother of two sons, ages 3 and 1, dreamed of becoming a beautician and sold tamales and empanadas in her Flushing neighborhood during summer months.
“We had been married for three years. I did not know that she was going for this procedure,” her husband, Theodore Paloumbas, told The News.