Some criminal stories don’t fall apart all at once, but they unravel for sure. For a California father, it began with a phone call from his ex-wife telling him their daughter, Paloma Nicole Arellano Escobedo, had died from Covid-19. But when he arrived at the funeral, he immediately knew something was wrong.
On Sept. 20, 2025, 14-year-old Paloma Nicole Arellano died suddenly. Her father, Carlos Arellano, was told by his ex-wife that she had passed away from complications related to Covid-19. Devastatingly, the news came just a day after he had first received the news of Paloma’s Covid diagnosis. Shocked and confused, he booked the earliest flight he could to attend the funeral.
Arellano had no reason to believe anything unusual had happened in the days leading up to his daughter’s death. That was, until he arrived at her funeral. As he approached the casket, he noticed his daughter looked different. And relatives raised concern about her breasts looking unusually big.
The father discovered breast implants on Paloma
When he raised the concern with his ex-wife, she denied knowing anything. But when Arellano examined his daughter’s body alone with his sister, sister-in-law, and mother, they were shocked to find out that Paloma had had breast implants.
“At the funeral, some relatives told me her breasts were larger than what she had before. When I mentioned it to her mother, she told me it wasn’t true, that she didn’t know anything.” (via AZ Central)
Arellano quickly took photographs of the implants and the scars and requested an autopsy. When investigations were launched, the truth couldn’t hide any longer. In the week before her death, Paloma had undergone breast augmentation, liposuction, and a Brazilian butt lift. But the surgeries were too harsh on her body.
In the aftermath, Paloma went into a cardiorespiratory arrest and had severe brain swelling. Doctors then induced a coma and connected the 14-year-old to a ventilator to save her life. But her little body couldn’t take it, and she died. An even horrifying detail that came out was the identity of the doctor who performed the surgeries. It was his ex-wife’s new partner.
The surgeries were done by her mother’s new boyfriend
Paloma’s mother was living with a 45-year-old plastic surgeon named Victor N., and the 14-year-old was at their house in Tijuana, Mexico, in the weeks before her death. While Arellano was aware of the setting, he didn’t know that Paloma had been taken to Victor N’s private clinic for a series of cosmetic procedures. The operations were also allegedly performed on the same day, a combination considered medically dangerous even for grown women.
When investigators questioned the clinic, the surgeon’s license was quickly suspended pending review. His connection to Paloma also raised questions about whether proper consent and safety protocols were followed. The prosecutor’s office released a statement on the case, saying:
We are investigating a probable lack of care on the part of the mother, a criminal offense contemplated in our code, placing a minor who was under her care and custody in risky situations… The doctor is also reviewing whether there was malpractice in the surgery performed on the teenager. There could be a crime of negligent homicide, and probably medical-professional liability.
Arellano says he did not know about any surgery. For him, the truth arrived too late, only at the funeral. And they were in the form of scars he never imagined seeing on his child.
