A 38-year-old Ohio woman died after traveling to Miami for cosmetic surgery, and state regulators have since suspended the license of the assisted living facility where she was recovering when she went into cardiac arrest. Nubia Arelly Sanchez Lopez underwent a Brazilian butt lift, liposuction and breast augmentation at 305 Plastic Surgery in Doral on June 16, then was taken to Stevens Grandparents Inc. in Miami-Dade County to recover.
Three days after her surgery, Sanchez Lopez became dizzy, weak and fainted, according to WPLG Local 10. About 40 minutes later she developed severe difficulty breathing, and facility staff recorded her oxygen saturation at just 58%. Staff contacted an on-call nurse, who instructed them to call 911 — but the outlet reports Stevens Grandparents had a policy requiring residents, rather than staff, to make emergency calls, and Kevin Diaz, identified in the report as her husband, said someone used his wife's cellphone to place the 911 call.
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue took Sanchez Lopez to Kendall Regional Hospital in critical condition. She suffered multiple cardiac arrests and her stomach had flooded with blood before she died. The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's Office classified her death as accidental, attributing it to complications of cosmetic surgery.
What Regulators Found Inside the Facility
Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration investigated the circumstances of Sanchez Lopez's death and conditions at Stevens Grandparents alongside the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office. AHCA ultimately suspended the facility's license after finding that staff working during the incident lacked valid first aid and CPR certifications, and that some of Sanchez Lopez's vital signs taken after her arrival were never documented in her medical record. Investigators also found her resident file lacked postsurgical care instructions, and the agency removed four other patients who were recovering from cosmetic procedures at the facility.
Stevens Grandparents is licensed as a six-bed assisted living facility offering limited nursing services, and had already received citations for deficiencies during inspections in March 2023 and again in June, September and November 2025, per the outlet's reporting. Zenen A. Bernal is listed as the administrator, financial officer and 100% controlling owner of Angelina ALF LLC and as an officer of Stevens Grandparents Inc. Yani Gil, who said she was a realtor involved in selling the Stevens Grandparents property, disputed AHCA's findings and defended the facility, saying it could not be shut down without an investigation.
Surgeon Already Faced a State Complaint
A Florida Department of Health complaint alleges that the surgeon involved, Dr. Fermin Morales, violated state rules governing gluteal fat grafting. That same complaint concerns another patient who died following a 2023 cosmetic procedure Morales performed — a 40-year-old woman who died after fat was allegedly injected into her gluteal muscles rather than the subcutaneous layer, causing fatal fat embolisms, according to The Mirror. State records show no final disciplinary finding related to that complaint, and Morales's Florida medical license remains active. Hoodline previously reported that the Doral clinic tied to that fatal 2023 case was placed on two years of probation with a $5,000 fine and mandatory bi-annual inspections. 305 Plastic Surgery declined to provide an on-the-record representative regarding Sanchez Lopez's postsurgical care.
A Regulatory Gap Between the Operating Room and Recovery
Florida has tightened rules inside the operating room in recent years. House Bill 1471, enacted in July 2023, requires surgeons to use real-time ultrasound guidance during gluteal fat grafting to keep fat out of the muscle and confined to the subcutaneous layer above the gluteal fascia, according to NewBeauty. Florida Board of Medicine rules also cap surgeons at three BBL procedures per day to limit fatigue-related errors, as previously reported by CBS News. Brazilian butt lifts have historically carried one of the highest mortality rates among cosmetic procedures, estimated between 1 in 2,351 and 1 in 6,241 patients globally, with pulmonary fat embolisms cited as the leading cause of death. A 2022 study published in PubMed Central by the National Institutes of Health found 25 BBL-related fat emboli deaths in South Florida between 2010 and 2022, including 14 after publication of safety recommendations from the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation.
But once patients leave the operating room, oversight becomes far murkier. State Representative Felicia Simone Robinson introduced House Bill 81 in October 2025 to create a dedicated licensing framework for postsurgical recovery homes, complete with staffing requirements, medical oversight and violation penalties. The bill received its first reading in January but was never heard by the full legislature, dying in the Health Care Facilities and Systems Subcommittee in March. Robinson has said an assisted living license is inappropriate for facilities caring for patients immediately after major surgery, and she plans to continue pursuing legislation addressing the gap.
Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration has said that providing 24-hour personal care — bathing, dressing, hygiene, medication assistance — triggers assisted living facility licensing requirements, even though standard ALFs are not designed or equipped to serve as postsurgical medical wards. According to Florida Agency for Health Care Administration inspection records, an assisted living facility must provide care and services appropriate to the needs of residents it accepts for admission. That mismatch has fueled a parallel crackdown: Miami-Dade law enforcement raided multiple unlicensed recovery operations in Cutler Bay and South Miami in July and August, where operators reportedly charged patients up to $450 a night for care without any medical or facility license. Out-of-state patients, including those traveling from Ohio, frequently land in one of these two gaps — illegal pop-up recovery houses or standard ALFs never built for surgical aftercare.
Sanchez Lopez's death adds to a broader pattern in South Florida's cosmetic surgery industry; NBC 6 South Florida has reported that more than a dozen women died from cosmetic surgery complications in the region between 2018 and 2024, prompting repeated emergency rulemaking by state medical boards. Separately, state health records cited an administrative complaint filed against another surgeon practicing at 305 Plastic Surgery in December 2025, which resulted in a fine and an order to complete medical records training on post-operative patient care.
