Chanel Steben was addicted to cosmetic procedures and nurse Anna Yakubovsky-Rositsan was her pusher. But while Steben thought she was in good hands, the unqualified practitioner was really injecting her buttocks with mineral oil and silicone she’d bought on the black market.

Other women seeking procedures at her Vaughan home office would later spend tens of thousands of dollars in foreign countries in a desperate bid to try to undo the damage inflicted on their bodies by Yakubovsky-Rositan.

They were the lucky ones — disfigured, but alive.

Steben, just 23, would collapse unconscious on the floor of Yakubovsky-Rositan’s office from a fatal embolism caused by the mineral oil that reached her lungs. Even more egregious, the nurse didn’t call 911 and told Steben’s panicking boyfriend to calm down — she was just sleeping and would wake up soon.

But she didn’t wake up. Hours passed before help was finally called but Steben never regained consciousness and died in hospital on April 18, 2017, from a lack of oxygen. Mineral oil emboli were found in her lungs, kidney and brain.

Five years later, Yakubovsky-Rositsan, 44, was in a Newmarket courtroom being sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to criminal negligence causing Steben’s death and criminal negligence causing bodily harm to seven other clients.

“Her behaviour was frankly shocking for a health care professional,” said Superior Court Justice Michelle Fuerst. “A substantial penitentiary sentence is required even though Ms. Yakubovsky-Rositsan is a first offender.”

The mother of three daughters had worked for a family doctor giving cosmetic injections until she suffered a traumatic head injury in 2014 and her boss said her behaviour changes meant she couldn’t continue. She then opened her own practice, offering discounted lip, cheek and butt injections for cash, assuring her clients that she was using approved Juvederm and Botox for the face and PMMA, a product illegal in Canada but used in other countries, for the butt lifts.

Yakubovsky-Rositsan, though, wasn’t really using any of those fillers — she was using ingredients you would find in a hardware store and charging about $4,000 for two bottles of what she falsely claimed was PMMA.

“Ms. Yakubovsky-Rositsan was well aware that as a registered nurse she was not professionally qualified or permitted to give cosmetic injections absent supervision by a doctor yet she did so, repeatedly,” the judge said.

Nor did she bother to verify what she was injecting. “She suspected at one point that the substance was silicone, yet she carried on using it,” Fuerst said. “She had no regard for the potential adverse consequences for the health of her victims.”

She was too eager to make money.

In addition to the tragic death of Steben, the list of injuries is long and disturbing: One woman was left with bumps, lumps and hard spots of different sizes on her buttocks but was told by Yakubovsky-Rositsan to stop complaining. “I’ve paid you thousands of dollars and my ass has something in it hard as a fucking rock and it’s painful,” the client replied in a text message. “I trusted u Anna and now u want to be rude to me?”

Doctors here said it was too dangerous to remove the material from her buttocks.

One client turned to a surgeon in the Dominican Republic but court heard the $10,000 procedure was only “partially successful” in cutting out the silicone. Another sought similar treatment in Colombia but after spending more than $25,000, came back to Toronto with an infection that required months of hospital care.

A third victim spent $66,000 for a New York plastic surgeon to remove silicone from her face.

“Ms. Steben lost her life. The lives of her parents will never be the same,” Fuerst said. “The other victims suffered various kinds of emotional and physical pain and actual disfigurement. They must live with the knowledge that there is foreign material in their bodies so potentially dangerous that some physicians will not even attempt to remove it for fear of the adverse consequences of dislodging it.”

Yet this cosmetic butcher could be free in just two years.

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