RivCo woman convicted of murder for deadly buttocks injection gets 15-to-life
City News Service
RIVERSIDE, Calif. (KESQ) – A Riverside County woman who was convicted of second-degree murder for injecting silicone oil into a woman’s buttocks just over a year after being found guilty of a lesser charge stemming from another woman’s death under similar circumstances was sentenced in Los Angeles today to 15 years to life in prison.
Jurors deliberated just over a day before finding Libby Adame, 55, guilty Oct. 9 of the murder charge, along with a count of practicing medicine without certification. The charges stemmed from the March 24 death of 59-year-old Cindyana Santangelo of Malibu.
Jurors also found true an allegation that Adame personally inflicted great bodily injury on Santangelo.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta — who ordered Adame to be held without bail after the jury’s verdict — rejected the defense’s motion for a new trial before handing down the sentence.
Defense attorney J. Michael Flanagan argued that the timeline of events that day “shows that there was no opportunity to do this act” and contended that authorities focused all of their attention on Adame.
“This was not an investigation. This was a rush to judgment,” Adame’s lawyer told the judge.
Deputy District Attorney Lee Cernok countered that the evidence “established without a doubt that Adame was there,” and also supported that “she did indeed perform the injection.”
The prosecutor noted in a written court filing that during Adame’s testimony in her own defense that the defendant “freely admitted that she still does the injections in Mexico despite her 2024 conviction for theinvoluntary manslaughter of Karissa Rajpaul.”
In denying the defense’s new trial motion, the judge said he found “sufficient probative evidence to sustain the verdict.”
Ohta noted that he did not find the defendant’s testimony to be credible, saying the evidence showed that Adame injected the silicone oil.
Santangelo’s husband, Frank, cited “the damage done by this woman” and said family members have had their lives “turned upside down.”
One of the couple’s two sons, Dante, said he was in Thailand at the time — a 16-hour flight away.
“I did not expect this to happen in my wildest dreams,” Dante Santangelo told the judge.
Adame and her daughter, Alicia Galaz, were found guilty in March 2024 of involuntary manslaughter — but acquitted of the more serious charge of murder — stemming from the Oct. 15, 2019, death of 26-year-old Karissa Rajpaul following buttocks injections administered at a Sherman Oaks home.
Adame was also convicted last year of three counts of practicing medicine without a certification, while her daughter was found guilty of two counts of practicing medicine without a certification.
Adame was sentenced in April 2024 to four years and four months in state prison, while her daughter was sentenced to three years and eight months in state prison, with Judge George G. Lomeli subsequently agreeing with an argument by Galaz’s attorney that the two were entitled to additional credit for the time they underwent electronic monitoring while out of custody following their August 2021 arrests at the home they shared.
The prosecutor told Ohta that she believed Adame has “earned” the 15- year-to-life prison sentence, saying the defendant has “refused to show any responsibility” and had been warned that she was “on notice” about the danger of the injections.
“Three hundred forty one days later, she does it again,” Cernok said.
In her closing argument in the latest case, the prosecutor told jurors that the judge in Adame’s first trial had warned the defendant in April 2024 that she was “on notice of the dangers that could result” from her actions after her conviction for involuntary manslaughter for Rajpaul’s death and that Lomeli had warned her that she could be charged with murder if it occurred again.
“Did she know better?” Cernok asked jurors of Adame, saying the answer was “a resounding yes.”
Santangelo died after being rushed from her home to a nearby hospital in Ventura County, with authorities subsequently determining that her cause of death was an embolism caused by a silicone injection, the prosecutor noted.
“There is no reasonable doubt in this case, ladies and gentlemen,” the deputy district attorney said.
Adame’s attorney countered that “She did not do it,” saying there were “no injections this time by her.”
Flanagan acknowledged that Adame had performed a “procedure” on Rajpaul in 2019 and that Rajpaul had died as a result of a silicone injection.
Adame’s lawyer noted that his client was still on probation at the time of Santangelo’s death and that she knew she can’t do “butt work” in California, but said the woman known as “the butt lady” or “La Tia” was working as a “consultant” on behalf of doctors who can legally perform buttocks injections in Tijuana, Mexico.
The defense attorney told jurors that his client wouldn’t have had enough time to perform the procedure after arriving at the woman’s house, and accused investigators of failing to adequately investigate after deciding that his client was the only suspect in the woman’s death.
He said Adame saw that Santangelo already had bandages on her buttocks at the time of the consultation in the “beauty room” of the woman’s home, arguing that someone else had performed the procedure earlier that resulted in the woman’s death.
During her testimony, Adame adamantly denied that she was the one who gave Santangelo any injections the day she died.
“Do you know who did?” her attorney asked.
“No,” the defendant responded.
Adame — who told jurors that she had done thousands of the procedures — said the puncture marks on Santangelo’s buttocks were “too high” and that “it’s not my work.” She testified that the woman told her that she had already gone to a “salon in Malibu.”
The defendant said Santangelo kept clearing her throat from the time she arrived at the home and was “already breathing like she needed air.” She said that the woman’s husband told her to leave after he called 911.
“You just happened to arrive after she got the injections from someone else?” the prosecutor asked Adame during cross-examination.
“Yes,” Adame responded.
Frank Santangelo testified that his wife of 24 years appeared to have been breathing normally before meeting with Adame and wanted a “butt enhancement” to correct lumps in her buttocks from hormone treatment, but didn’t want to increase the size of her buttocks.
He said his wife — who had worked as an actress — subsequently was “struggling to breathe,” was squirming on the massage table and “had blood coming from each butt cheek.”
The woman’s husband testified that Adame told him, “This has never happened to a client of mine before.”
He said Adame told him she might have something in her car that could help the woman and packed her bag, telling jurors that Adame never came back into the house again.
The woman’s husband said he never saw his wife’s phone again, but was eventually able to access her messages with Adame from her iCloud and alerted authorities after he recognized photos that his wife had taken of Adame’s buttocks and tattoos in his presence that afternoon.
After last month’s verdict, Santangelo’s husband told reporters outside court that his wife “received the justice she deserved.”
Meanwhile, the defense attorney maintained after the verdict that his client “wasn’t there” when Santangelo received the buttocks injections
“This is a travesty,” Adame’s lawyer said, adding that Adame plans to appeal her conviction.
Adame was arrested May 12 by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department personnel and has remained behind bars since then, jail records show.
