An NYPD detective died in a Colombian hospital a week after undergoing liposuction and a butt lift, sources tell the Daily News — and her devastated husband is calling for an investigation to find out what happened.
Det. Alicia Stone, 40, a 13-year NYPD veteran assigned to the Internal Affairs Bureau, died Thursday at the Fundacion Valle del Lili hospital in Cali, Colombia, shortly after she was found unresponsive in her hotel room, police sources said.
“The doctor who called me from Colombia just called me and told me my wife had just passed away,” Stone’s husband, Michael Stone, told The News. “She didn’t even have any information to tell me when I was asking her…. Something just doesn’t add up.”
Stone’s husband described her as “beautiful” and a police officer with the “highest of integrity.”
“She was the mother of three kids,” he said. “She was a perfectionist. She strived for the highest degree of work. And in a short space of time, she moved from being a police officer to Internal Affairs, to a second-degree detective. I want her to be remembered as an officer who was loved by her peers and greatly, greatly loved by her family. And we miss her so much.”
Michael said his wife was “perfectly fine” before the procedure and relatives spoke to her the day before she died “and she was fine.”
“To be called Thursday and told that she passed away, that is just shocking and hurtful,” he said. “I don’t have the facts and that’s what I need, the facts of what happened.”
According to police sources, Alicia was receiving anticoagulant medication and oral pain medicine after the procedure as she stayed in a hotel post-surgery.
A woman found Alicia unconscious in her hotel room about 6:30 a.m. Thursday and she was taken to the hospital in Cali, where she died at about 7:50 a.m., sources said. She had gone into cardiac arrest, the sources said.
After her death, authorities contacted the Colombia National Police, the U.S. State Department and a consular services official, police sources said.
Alicia’s husband said authorities in Colombia are looking into what happened and that the NYPD has sent someone to the South American nation.
“I will request an autopsy when she returns,” he said. “I need to know. I need some independence.”
An NYPD spokesperson confirmed her death but didn’t answer a question about whether the department has sent an investigator to Colombia.
An online fundraiser for her family describes Alicia as “a dedicated public servant who spent her career protecting and serving others.”
“Alicia’s kindness, courage, and compassion touched everyone she met both in and out of uniform,” the page reads. “Her unexpected passing has left a tremendous void in the lives of her family, friends, and fellow officers.”
Michael was shocked to learn his wife was in a hotel rather than a recovery facility so soon after the procedure.
The doctor who performed the procedure only gave him bare-bones information when she called him shortly after 11 a.m. Thursday to notify him about her death. “(I) was told, ‘I’m so sorry. Your wife had some medical episode and they tried to save her,’” he said. “And that was it.”
“She said it might have been a heart attack or blood clot,” he added. “She didn’t know anything.”
He has asked for every record he can get about her death.
“I have no trust at this point in anything that has occurred in Colombia,” he said.
A 2017 report in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal found that butt enhancements are 10 to 20 times more dangerous than other kinds of cosmetic surgery performed in U.S. hospitals and clinics.
Worldwide, the report says, about one of every 3,448 butt enhancement patients die because of the surgery — far higher than the overall U.S. death rate from cosmetic surgery, which is about one in 55,000.
