A woman was arrested for criminally negligent homicide four years after giving a butt lift injection to a woman who died from the botched procedure, cops said Thursday.
Alicia Leslie, 47, was arrested Friday and charged with unauthorized practice of a profession in addition to the homicide charge for the death of Maxine Messam.
Messam, 53, of Bridgeport, Conn., was dumped at Jacobi Medical Center on Feb. 15, 2022, naked from the waist down, with needle marks on her body. Doctors found a foreign substance had been injected into her buttocks.
Leslie, who according to cops live in Mount Vernon, was released without bail after being arraigned in Bronx Criminal Supreme Court Friday.
“She denies the allegations,” Leslie’s lawyer, Kyle Watters, told the Daily News Thursday. “She looks forward to her day in court. I’m confident she’ll be exonerated because she didn’t do anything wrong.”
Watters said his client is married with kids and owns an interstate trucking company.
Leslie has multiple prior arrests, according to cops, including for grand larceny, petty larceny and possession of stolen property.
Two women were being sought after they drove Messam to Jacobi Medical Center in the victim’s own BMW SUV and then walked off, leaving the vehicle behind.
“We don’t know what happened,” the victim’s husband Carlos Simpson told the Daily News after his wife’s unexpected death, speaking outside the family’s home in Bridgeport. “She was at work, and she left work. So we don’t know what happened from there.”
Police got involved when the hospital called 911 shortly after the woman died.
The two women who dropped her off cast themselves as good Samaritans to hospital staff before taking off, claiming they found her in distress at Woodlawn Cemetery and wanted to help her, police said.