Young mother made terrible mistake after gory plastic surgery procedure that ended up KILLING her
Ahmonique Miller, 28, and her sister, 19-year-old Kiera Barnes, traveled to Miami from Las Vegas to get a Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) and liposuction at Avana Plastic Surgery in March, as reported by NBC 6 News.
However, Ahmonique, the mother of a one-year-old daughter, died just hours later at an unlicensed post-surgical recovery facility operating under the name Keyla's Recovery House.
The medical examiner has attributed Miller's death to acute combined drug toxicity - particularly a mix of prescription painkiller oxycodone and unregulated drug bromazolam, according to documents obtained by NBC.
According to the medical examiner's report, bromozolam is a 'potent designed drug, commonly found in counterfeit pills or powders'.
'My daughter's supposed to be here with her daughter and unfortunately, she's not,' Wakeelah Miller, Ahmonique's mother, told NBC 6 News.
'I have to remind myself every day that this is real,' she added. 'She's not calling, she's not going to send a text and... Ahmonique is not coming back.'
In March, an excited Ahmonique documented her journey from Nevada to Florida on social media to undergo cosmetic surgery alongside her sister.
'Come to Pre Op with me,' she said in one of the videos she posted before surgery.
'I'm super excited... The office staff is super nice, they made me feel super comfortable.. and I know this is gonna be the best. I can't wait to see my results,' Ahmonique added.
The surgery on March 6 reportedly went well, and they were discharged to a recovery home to be monitored for complications.
Her mother Wakeelah previously told NBC 6 that the sisters each paid $1,500 for a six-night stay at Kayla's Recovery House, which they discovered through social media.
But tragedy was to follow, with Ahmonique's social media falling completely quiet after the procedure, which sees fat injected into the buttocks and is notoriously dangerous.
The day after the surgery, authorities responded to the home and found Ahmonique dead, showing signs of rigor mortis - an indication she had been dead for hours. Officials said her body was heavily damaged and face down on a bed.
Police said the house was 'operating as an illegal post-plastic surgery recovery home'.
The grieving mother initially told the outlet that her surviving daughter claimed Ahmonique had been given 'a muscle relaxer and possibly multiple Percocets'.
The day after the surgery, authorities responded to the home and found Ahmonique dead, showing signs of rigor mortis - an indication she had been dead for hours. Officials said her body was heavily damaged and face down on a bed (pictured: illegal recovery house)
Her sister, Kiera, also told police that Ahmonique was given medication before she went to sleep - but never woke up.
Kiera said that both sisters were initially scheduled to be operated on by the same surgeon, but beforehand, Ahmonique reportedly switched to a different surgeon.
Now, according to the medical examiner's report obtained by NBC 6, the sudden death of the 28-year-old mother was caused by the combination of of oxycodone and bromazolam.
The report states that 'the use of these drugs in the hours following Ahmonique's procedure are responsible for the fatal outcome', adding that no evidence of surgical complications were found.
'From what Kiera is saying that a muscle relaxer was given and possibly multiple Percocet's and muscle relaxers,' Wakeelah told the outlet.
Keyla Oliver, the owner of the illegal recovery house, reportedly told investigators that she gave Ahmonique two percocets, despite not being licensed to practice medicine, according to NBC 6.
Ahmonique's sister also told investigators that Oliver gave her an unspecified number of muscle relaxers along with two percocets from an 'unlabeled pill bottle' because Ahmonique's 'medication was not ready'.
'As far as we know, her actual prescription was never picked up from the pharmacy,' Wakeelah told NBC.
An online petition has since been launched, calling for new legislation to regulate unlicensed recovery homes operating out of South Florida.
'Unlicensed recovery homes operate without oversight, lacking the necessary credentials and safety protocols to ensure a safe recovery environment,' the petition reads.
'Miami's appeal as a destination for cosmetic and other surgical procedures is undeniable. The city must also be a place where patient safety is prioritized and enforced.'
'Legislation mandating stringent licensing requirements for recovery homes will not only save lives but also elevate Miami's status as a safe medical destination,' it added.
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Jayne Mansfield's death, on June 29 1967, was subject to as much wilfully inaccurate reporting as her life had been. For decades, the rumour circulated that this 34-year-old blonde bombshell – one of Hollywood's favourite post-war pin-ups – had been decapitated when the sedan she was in slammed into the back of a truck, just outside New Orleans. According to none other than her undertaker, one Jim Roberts, this was hogwash. The impact of the collision, which flung the car's engine into the front seat and killed two other adults and a dog, also caused Mansfield's wig to be thrown to the side of the road. It's this that was mistaken in news stories for her head, a myth morbidly perpetuated for years, including by JG Ballard in his 1973 novel, Crash. The more ghoulish reports barely concentrated on the fact that three of Mansfield's five children, Mickey, Zoltan and Mariska, had been sleeping in the back, and emerged injured but alive. 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Casting director Milton Lewis claimed she was wasting her 'obvious talents', and told her to return and do a scene from The Seven Year Itch. This required her to dye her hair blonde and, obviously, wear more revealing clothes. Eagerly, she consented. The competition with Monroe – and other female sex symbols of the day, such as Sophia Loren (who famously gave Mansfield 'the original side-eye' in a photograph in which the Italian actress is looking disdainfully at Mansfield's cleavage) – became something like a nuclear arms race. The goal was achieving (in every sense of the phrase) maximum exposure, including posing in Playboy magazine. Mansfield would often explain that her straining for the spotlight was merely plotted as a means to an end. But she never reached that end. She yearned, much like Monroe, to be taken seriously as an actor, seeing this quick-fix stardom as leverage to get her pick of the parts. In the process, she became the victim of her own success in Hollywood – so obliging at being sculpted into a Monroe-a-like that, ultimately, no one would let her escape being stereotyped as a 'dumb blonde' with particularly pneumatic measurements. It was all a performance, and one even her children found wearying at the time. Her oldest son, Mickey Jr, talks of rolling his eyes when he heard Jayne donning her trademark squeaky voice – not just in film roles, but her publicity interviews. Mansfield had been schooled by everyone around her to be this crowd-pleasing version of herself, without fail. But when she wanted to step outside that box, as Elizabeth Taylor (and indeed Monroe) were beginning to manage, she found no roles of substance awaiting her. The peak of her film career came early, in Frank Tashlin's satirical comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), based on a play by Itch screenwriter George Axelrod. That same year, Mansfield was interviewed on CBC's Tabloid in Canada. 'I've used my pin-up-type publicity to get my foot in the door,' she explained. 'Because it never was really my ambition and now I feel I'm at a point where I can relax on the pin-up publicity – the cheesecake – and go much further dramatically… [it was] a means to an end, I don't know if I should say I liked it, but I felt it would do me some good as far as being recognised and being put into a position to be able to project myself for what I really wanted to attain.' One of those ambitions, she continued, was 'to win an Academy Award – at least one.' But, by 1963, after a spate of gritty noirs and international productions that did her few favours, she was reduced to baring everything in the sex comedy Promises! Promises!, which openly courted her Playboy fans – 'Now See ALL of Jayne Mansfield!'. In a slightly toe-curling encounter with Robert Robinson in 1960, Mansfield was asked to sum up what she felt was the secret of sex appeal. 'It's a wonderful, warm, womanly feeling,' she said. 'It has nothing to do with measurements and lipstick… it's the vibrancy you find present in a young kitten.' Following Promises! Promises!, Mansfield found it even harder to be taken seriously. She had studied piano and violin at school, talents she trotted out on the talk-show circuit to prove her intelligence (she apparently had an IQ of 163). The documentary has a clip of her performing Vivaldi, very impressively, on The Ed Sullivan Show. When she tried to repeat this for Jack Paar a few years later, he interrupted her with, 'Who cares? Kiss me!', to the delight of the crowd. She played along with giggles on air – but the implications were obvious. Keen as she was to orchestrate a shift in how the public perceived her, that ship had sailed. The bedrock of her marriage to Mickey Hargitay was crumbling at the same time, mainly because of her own infidelities. There were reasons for those, too – liaisons which (perhaps apocryphally; the rumour gets zero airtime in the documentary) may have included both Kennedy brothers. Mansfield's father had died when she was three years old – from a heart attack, while driving. In a freaky parallel with her three-year-old daughter's later experience, she was in the car. It doesn't take a psychology degree to puzzle out the paternal void this planted in her life, which she tried to fill with every man – husband, lover, whatever – who came along. Hargitay's siblings have few kind words to say about husband number three (the film director Matt Cimber, in a short-lived marriage marked by violent rages) or Mansfield's next relationship with her divorce attorney, Sam Brody, who died alongside her. The weirdest publicity stunt of Mansfield's career – if that indeed is what it was – happened the year before her death. While visiting the San Francisco Film Festival in 1966, she met a man called Anton LaVey, one of the most notorious characters on the counter-cultural scene. This self-styled founder of the Church of Satan did not convert her into worshipping the Devil, as has sometimes been claimed, but he did get Mansfield to hold a skull for one photoshoot, while he mimed some kind of ritual in a black cape. And he did place a curse on Brody – who was jealous of their friendship – claiming that the lawyer would be dead within a year. In a car crash. This occult myth is related at length in a hybrid documentary musical, the considerably-less-authorised Mansfield 66/67 (2017). A last shock lay in wait for Hargitay in adulthood. When she was 25, the head of one of her mother's fan clubs showed her a photo of a man named Nelson Sardelli, an Italian singer who was her own spitting image. Mansfield and he, it turned out, had a brief dalliance in 1963, and Hargitay was his biological daughter. After Mansfield's death, Mickey Jr, Zoltan and Mariska were raised by their father and stepmother, Ellen Siano. Only the two boys were Mickey Hargitay's own. Sardelli didn't want, he claims, to disrupt or meddle with his daughter's new chance for a happy childhood, so allowed the cover story to stand. Even when Mariska was told, she too kept the secret for years, after having it out with the man who raised her. 'It was all about loyalty,' she said to The Hollywood Reporter. 'Mickey didn't admit it to me… he said it wasn't true, and he was such a loyal human who I thought was the best father – I saw how much it hurt him in the moment of me confronting him.' It's just the final twist in a Hollywood life that has kept on entwining sadness and scandal long after it was shattered. My Mom Jayne is available on Sky Go and NOW
