Lidocaine by syringe in a ground-floor flat in Astoria, arrested at JFK the same day: the unlicensed 'surgeon' sentenced to five to fifteen years in Queens

New York licenses physicians through the State Education Department's Office of the Professions, and that is where the Queens District Attorney's office told the public to check a provider's credentials after one case in Astoria. A cosmetic procedure performed in a private flat by a man who presented himself as a surgeon ended in a death and, in July 2026, a prison sentence.

According to the Queens District Attorney's office, on 28 March 2025 a 31-year-old mother of two went to an apartment on 35th Street in Astoria at about 1 p.m. to have silicone buttock implants removed. Felipe Hoyos Foronda, who had set up the flat as a makeshift clinic and held no licence to practise medicine in the United States, gave her lidocaine and saline by syringe while a friend waited in the living room. She became light-headed and went into cardiac arrest; he started an intravenous line and called 911. Paramedics found her unconscious in a medical chair and took her to Mount Sinai Queens, where she showed no brain activity; she was removed from life support on 11 April 2025. An autopsy found she died of lidocaine toxicity. QNS reported on 3 April 2025 that he drove off while paramedics were still removing the patient, that police tracked his number plate along the Van Wyck Expressway towards JFK Airport, and that Port Authority officers detained him after security before he could board a flight to Florida and on to Colombia. Department of Buildings inspectors found the ground floor converted into an illegal medical office with an examination chair, syringes and injectable Botox and filler, and issued violations and a partial vacate order for an illegally converted cellar apartment in the same house.

An indictment announced by the DA's office on 28 April 2025 charged him with second-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault and unauthorised practice of a profession. The office said a search of his home had found a metal IV stand, injectables, a needle-disposal box and a binder of names, and asked anyone who had used his services to come forward. He pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter in June 2026, and on 30 July 2026 Justice Ushir Pandit-Durant sentenced him to five to fifteen years in prison. District Attorney Melinda Katz said he 'had no business practicing as a doctor or surgeon'.

There was no forged diploma in this case, only an apartment fitted out as a clinic and a client who did not know that the man in it held no licence. The check that failed was the one the DA's office itself recommended afterwards: looking up the provider's name with the Office of the Professions before lying down in the chair.

For students and families the rule is the same everywhere. A surgeon has a licence number, operates in a licensed facility and can be found on a regulator's register. A procedure offered in a flat, by someone whose name appears on no register, is not a bargain; it is an unlicensed experiment with a local anaesthetic.