Two people met through Orange County's transgender community, one later administered silicone to the buttocks of the other and the transgender woman later died.
On Thursday afternoon, Liborio De La Luz Ramos accepted a plea deal from Orange County Superior Court Judge Gassia Apkarian, pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter and unauthorized practice of medicine. The 45-year-old Santa Ana resident was immediately sentenced to three years and eight months in jail—minus 630 days already served.
Ramos did not have a medical license or authorization to perform medical procedures in California some time between Dec. 30 and 31 of last year when he met Felipe “Katya” De La Riva at an Orange hotel and injected her with silicone. De La Riva checked herself into a local hospital on New Year's Day. Three weeks later, she was dead from silicone embolism syndrome.
The cause of death prompted the hospital to contact the county coroner, which in turn notified the Santa Ana Police Department, according to Cpl. Anthony Bertagna, the agency's spokesman.
An investigation determined Ramos also administered an anesthetic and injected silicone into a 28-year-old victim at the defendant's own home last New Year's Day, according to prosecutors.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.