Attorney To Seek Dismissal Of Murder Charge In Injection Case

A Salinas attorney will ask a judge to dismiss murder charges against Martha Vasquez, 39, the woman charged with killing a Castroville woman by injecting vegetable oil into her buttocks as an enhancement procedure.

The preliminary hearing to determine if Vasquez will stand trial on charges of murder, involuntary manslaughter, grand theft and practicing medicine without a license was scheduled to conclude Thursday. Instead, defense attorney Tom Worthington asked Judge Terrance Duncan to give him more time to prepare an argument that there is insufficient evidence to show Vasquez knew the procedure was dangerous, an element required for prosecutor Steve Somers to prove murder

A Salinas cosmetologist, Vasquez is accused of injecting Mazola vegetable oil into the buttocks of Olivia Aguirre-Castillo of Castroville on Nov. 17. Aguirre-Castillo, who believed she was receiving an anti-wrinkle treatment, fell into a coma and died a week later from massive organ failure.

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. The injections left multiple cyst-like lumps of thick gelatinous goop embedded deep into the skin of her buttocks.

She was hot, dizzy, and extremely thirsty. She then became confused and disoriented. Aguirre-Castillo fell to the floor and began convulsing.

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.

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.”

“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.”

“People are injecting just about anything these days,” Wells says.

The most common is industrial-grade silicone: caulking. As in the same kind of gummy, sticky substance used to seal a shower, to set a toilet, to seal up seams on siding or baseboards—the kind of over-the-counter product found in any home-improvement store.

Wells has had to perform complete mastectomies on women who had their breasts injected with industrial-grade silicone. “One man came in and had been injected in his penis with the same kind of thing. There wasn’t much we could do for him, either,” Wells says.

The deaths and maimings are multiplying.

As widespread as the practice of rogue beauty treatments has become in recent years, South Florida has become a virtual hot spot for the back-alley procedures. Those in search of fixing a little of this or that go to so-called “pumping parties” and are injected with substances that boggle the mind: brake fluid, Super Glue, paraffin, saline, oil, or peanut butter, diluted so the material goes through the syringe more easily.

n late 2004, Diane Richie, the now-ex-wife of music legend Lionel Richie, was taken into federal custody for her role in the administration of illegal anti-wrinkle injections. Richie’s boyfriend, Daniel Tomas Fuente Serrano, was accused of using the Richies’ Beverly Hills home for what were dubbed “Hollywood House Parties.” At the time of the parties, the Richies were still a couple.

A Richie employee told investigators that 20 to 40 people went to the Richie estate to get injections from Serrano, also known as “Dr. Daniel.” While Serrano was licensed to practice medicine in Argentina, he was not recognized as a physician by the Unitied States. At some point after the parties, Serrano became a registered nurse in California.

Lionel Richie told investigators he believed Serrano was a doctor. Richie went on to explain that he, too, had received injections at the parties, often paying hundreds of dollars per shot.

According to court documents, the wrinkle-filler injections Serrano was delivering left one woman with a lump on her lip, while another developed holes in her face from the injections.

Diane Richie was later charged with aiding and abetting.

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