Whalesca Castillo be escorted by police (WABC screenshot) and Lesbia Ayala (Jason Lloyd Funeral Home)
A 49-year-old woman in New York City will spend several years behind bars for killing a 48-year-old woman by illegally injecting silicone into the victim’s buttocks and thighs without any kind of medical license. A Bronx County supreme court judge on Thursday ordered Whalesca Castillo to serve a sentence of four to eight years in a state correctional facility in connection with the 2017 death of Lesbia Ayala, authorities confirmed to Law&Crime.
The sentence was handed down after Castillo in December reached a deal with prosecutors and agreed to plead guilty to one count of second-degree manslaughter and one count of second-degree assault over the deadly buttock augmentation injection she illegally provided inside of her home in the Bronx.
“The defendant illegally injected the victim with a silicone substance for cosmetic purposes. Tragically, the injections killed the victim,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said in a statement.
“The defendant also performed a (separate) dangerous cosmetic procedure that left another woman with substantial pain,” the DA noted.
The other procedure, which resulted in the assault charge, stemmed from a 2018 incident in which Castillo illegally injected a 39-year-old woman with silicone.
The nonlethal procedure was also an attempt to “enhance the buttocks of the victim,” but instead left her with “extensive infections and pain in her buttocks and thighs,” the DA’s office said. As a result of Castillo’s actions, the victim was forced to have “most of the tissue in the affected area” surgically removed.
“Ever since this happened, I have been regretting it so much,” Castillo said in court, per New York NBC affiliate WNBC. “So ashamed for myself and for my family because that was not the way they raised me.”
Lesbia Ayala’s sister, Vanessa Ayala, spoke to reporters outside of the courthouse following the hearing, where she vehemently criticized Castillo’s sentence as being far too lenient.
“Four years is not enough,” she said, according to a report from New York City ABC affiliate WABC. “This is not the first time she did what she did. This was her third time. The last time resulted in my sister’s death. There’s no way that four years is justice.”
The “third” incident Vanessa Ayala appeared to be referencing is Castillo’s 2011 federal conviction on one count of distributing or injecting an adulterated or misbranded product. She admitted to illegally providing silicone injections as part of an “underground business she ran out of her home” where she often charged more than $1,000 for each round of shots, prosecutors with the Southern District of New York previously said.
Federal prosecutors said she had been unlawfully importing the silicone from the Dominican Republic and using it to perform breast and butt enhancements. At least one of the women who received the injections later experienced shortness of breath and fainted just hours later. When the woman called Castillo for help, Castillo “discouraged the woman from seeking proper medical attention, saying that a hospital would not help her because the procedure was illegal.”
In the federal case, Castillo served one year in prison and was fined $100,000.
