Alicia Leslie, 47, has been charged with criminally negligent homicide in the death of a Connecticut woman following an illegal silicone butt injection procedure.
Leslie, of Mount Vernon, was arraigned last Friday before Judge Pamela Goldsmith, who granted her supervised release. The charges stem from the February 2022 death of Maxine Messam, 53, of Bridgeport, who suffered fatal cardiac arrest after receiving back-alley injections from Leslie, according to police.
Investigators uncovered text messages between Leslie and Messam that showed the pair had planned to meet in Yonkers on Feb. 15, 2022, for the bootleg beauty procedure, law enforcement sources said. When the injections went wrong, Leslie and another woman allegedly transported Messam to Jacobi Medical Center, leaving her unconscious and without pants, with visible injection marks on her buttocks, before fleeing in a van.
The two women had initially claimed they discovered Messam in distress at Woodlawn Cemetery, police said at the time. The second woman has not been charged in connection with Messam’s death.
Leslie’s criminal history includes a petit larceny arrest in Midtown in 2000, along with two additional petit larceny charges from the 1990s.
The case highlights a disturbing pattern of deaths linked to unlicensed cosmetic practitioners. Federal agencies have documented a rise in fake practitioners operating in New York, Florida, Texas, and California, with at least a dozen people dying in recent years from illicit silicone injections, many of them butt enhancement procedures.
Tamira Mobley, 32, an unlicensed cosmetologist, took a plea deal in 2017 for killing a Queens mother with an illegal butt-enhancement injection. Mobley pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault, and unauthorized practice of a profession, receiving a sentence of one and one-third to four years in prison.
In 2021, Lisa Fernandez, 47, of Houston was charged with manslaughter for performing an unlicensed silicone butt injection that killed Marja McClendon, 38, of St. Louis, Missouri, officials said.
A California woman known as “the butt lady” was found guilty of murder last year for killing “Married… With Children” actress Cindyana Santangelo during a botched injection session.
Leslie’s next court date has not been publicly scheduled.