A young police officer from New Orleans passed away just days after getting a Brazilian butt lift and reporting "extreme pain" after the procedure.
Wildelis Rosa, 26, told her family she was heading from New Orleans to Miami in March to celebrate her birthday.
But according to her older sister, Anamin Vazquez, she didn’t mention her plans to get a cosmetic surgery.
Rosa, who also served in the US Army Reserve and had recently returned from a deployment in Kuwait, had pre-surgery blood work completed at Prestige Plastic Surgery Clinic in South Florida on March 19.
The very next day, doctors performed the Brazilian butt lift, removing fat from 12 parts of her body and transferring it to her buttocks.
According to an invoice, Rosa paid $7,495 for the procedure — commonly known as a BBL.
That’s well below the high end of the typical U.S. cost range of $6,000 to $18,000, which is why Miami is often a hotspot for these surgeries.
After the operation, Rosa was recovering at a short-term rental. She told her family about the surgery three days later.
Still, her sister Vazquez said they instantly had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right — "in our guts like something is wrong."
"I texted her and I said, 'I hope you're doing okay you're enjoying your birthday.' But there was no answer back," Vazquez said.
The following morning, March 23, Rosa collapsed in the bathroom. A friend who was staying with her rushed in and found her unresponsive.
They performed CPR immediately, but it was already too late.
According to NBC6, the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s report confirmed that Rosa died from a pulmonary embolism caused by blood clots related to the cosmetic surgery.
Rosa had gone in for a follow-up the day after the surgery. During that visit, she told her doctor she was experiencing "extreme pain,".
While back at the rental, she was having trouble breathing. Her blood pressure, according to her friend, had been "drastically" dropping.
Her friend also mentioned that the day before she died, Rosa’s appearance had changed — her skin looked pale, her pupils were dilated, her lips had turned purple, and she had lost feeling in her legs and feet.
Rosa’s devastated sister shared that her little sister had also reached out to another friend the night before she passed, telling them about her low blood pressure and circulation issues in her feet.
Vazquez strongly believes that if someone had acted on these symptoms earlier, Rosa might still be alive today.
"It's that's the part that we have to live with because it was unnecessary for her to die … to die like that," she said, adding that Rosa, the youngest of five siblings, had once dreamed of joining the FBI before her life was tragically cut short.
According to NBC6, Rosa’s death adds to a growing number of fatalities linked to cosmetic surgeries done in the Miami area.
The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office has reported 25 deaths tied to complications from cosmetic procedures in the past three and a half years. These cases involve a range of clinics and doctors.
The Brazilian butt lift — which has existed since the 1960s — became much more popular in the 2010s, largely thanks to social media and celebrity culture.
Between 2014 and 2015, the number of procedures rose by 30%, as noted by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Fast forward to 2024, and nearly 30,000 BBLs were performed in the U.S. alone.
That means this one procedure made up 28% of all cosmetic surgeries in the country.
Even with its popularity, the BBL continues to be one of the riskiest surgeries out there. According to the National Library of Medicine, about one in every 15,000 patients dies from complications — even after strict safety measures were introduced in 2019.
The biggest risks linked to this type of surgery are fat embolism and venous thromboembolism. These happen when fat is accidentally injected into a blood vessel, which can then carry it to the lungs or other vital organs, sometimes with fatal consequences.