A Harlem mom who underwent buttock enhancement surgery died nearly two weeks later — and her livid family is calling it murder.
Latesha Bynum’s family and lawyer said she went to a shady clinic on July 15 to get silicone injections from someone claiming to be a doctor.
Those injections cost the 31-year-old mom of two her life, her family said.
“My daughter was murdered,” Bertie Bynum, 51, Latesha’s distraught mother, told the Daily News on Monday.
“I want to know: Why did they kill my baby? Why did they do that. They wasn’t supposed to do that.”
She added, “You killed a mother, you killed a sister!”
Police provided only scant details about the office where Bynum got her injections on July 15.
Cop sources said she received the procedure in a residential building on E. 21st St. by First Ave., across the street from Stuyvesant Town, but didn’t provide the name of a medical clinic or a doctor.
Bynum received her injections at 1 p.m., sources said. At 11 p.m. that night, she called 911 from home, after she felt dizzy and started feeling chest pains, sources said.
Medics rushed her to Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Medical Center, where doctors declared her brain-dead.
On Thursday — just three days before her 32nd birthday — doctors removed her from life support, and she was declared dead, sources said.
Police are still investigating what happened, and are awaiting autopsy results from the city medical examiner’s office, authorities said.
Her cause of death has not been determined, pending further tests, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner said Tuesday.
Bynum’s family was more sure — they called it murder.
Her brother, Tymel Bynum, 26, said her feet turned blue after the procedure, and she was placed in the shower twice at the clinic where she received the injection before being sent home.
“Why wasn’t she taken to medical care? That probably could’ve saved her life,” he said.
“That’s murder. Just because the person didn’t pull a trigger, it’s still murder.”
Bynum, the mother of two daughters, ages 13 and 8, posted a photo of herself and a friend on Facebook just one day before the procedure.
“U look beautiful boo!!” one friend wrote.
“Thank you so much,” she gushed in response.
Bynum’s family lawyer, Jack Yankowitz, said the injection was done by someone “representing himself as a doctor.”
“This is some sort of underground type of procedure — this is not something that’s done by professional doctors,” he said.
He said he’s seeking more information from police and the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and held off on commenting further.
Cops couldn’t say Tuesday whether the procedure was a legal one.
Bynum’s brother, Tymel, said she didn’t think the procedure would have been risky.
“If she had high confidence in it, I don’t think she felt like it was a risk that would’ve took her life. I don’t think she would’ve jeopardized that for her daughters,” he said.
In 2015, authorities ruled two botched butt enhancement procedures homicides. That May, a Maryland woman died after getting butt injections in a Queens basement by a quack doctor who fled the scene.
In August 2015, a 40-year-old nonprofit executive was found dead in her Bronx home of an embolism caused by “cosmetic silicone injections” of the buttocks.
With Graham Rayman
