'Dr. Bumbum's BUSTED! Celebrity plastic surgeon arrested over patient's death in Rio
Celebrity plastic surgeon from Brazil - Dr. Denis Furtado - famously known as Dr. Bumbum, was arrested on Thursday in connection with the death of one of his patients. Furtado has been on the run since Saturday, the day he reportedly performed a buttock enhancement procedure on bank manager Lilian Calixto at his Rio home, following which she died. Authorities at Rio De Janerio said that Furtado was detained and arrested after the local police received an anonymous tip from a member of the public.
Calixto, Furtado's patient, passed away after he gave her injections to make her buttocks much larger than they were. The plastic surgeon faces murder charges. Furtado's mother has also been arrested by the authorities, as she is also an accomplice to her son's crime.
Detectives have said that Furtado has performed the buttock enlargening procedure at his home in Rio. 46-year-old Calixto was a bank manager and a mother-of-two. She fell violently ill while the procedure was happening. According to the authorities, Furtado then rushed her to a nearby hospital where her condition got a lot worse, and she passed away a few hours later. The local media reported that she had reached the hospital and had been suffering from an abnormally fast heart rate, reported the BBC.
The celebrity plastic surgeon then fled. On July 18, his lawyer made a statement that he was innocent and that the reason he had not turned himself into the police was because he had been panicking.
In a video, posted on social media after his arrest on July 19, Furtado said that Calixto's death was a "fatal accident" and that he had performed almost 9,000 procedures like hers out of his home. He further claimed that they were all legal in Brazil. The 45-year-old plastic surgeon has appeared on Brazilian TV and used to have close to 650,000 followers on his Instagram account, which now have increased to 663,000 followers.
Calixto reportedly traveled almost 2,000km (1,250 miles) from where she lived in Cuiaba, central Brazil, on July 14 evening, in order to undergo the buttock enlargement procedure by Furtado. The procedure allegedly involves injecting an acrylic glass filler into the buttock. The said procedure was done inside Furtado's apartment, in a high-class district of Barra de Tijuca in Rio.
Furtado's girlfriend was also detained and arrested on suspicion of her involvement in the procedure that killed Calixto. The Regional Medical Council of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Cremerj) announced that it launched an investigation into the bank manager's death.
Referring to the tragedy, the President of the Brazilian Plastic Surgery Society, Niveo Steffen, has said that "the growing invasion of non-specialists in the specialty has provoked more and more fatalities like this one." In his interview to AFP, he said: "You cannot perform plastic surgery inside an apartment. Many people are selling a dream, a fantasy to patients in an unethical way and people, weakened, are often attracted to low prices, without considering whether or not the conditions are adequate."
Furtado has a gigantic social media following and is quite popular among his fans and clientele. His Facebook page is also very active, and he regularly fills his social media pages up with before-and-after shots of buttock procedures performed by him. Furtado also has a YouTube channel where he gives advice on topics ranging from endometriosis to low-carb diets.
In one of the social media posts, he was given the now-famous nickname of Dr. Bumbum by one of his fans and the plastic surgeon decided to keep the name as a term of endearment.