Joy Barbera, a 48-year-old mother of two, entered Memorial Ambulatory Surgery Center in Houston, Texas, on August 13, 2025. After several hours and six plastic surgeries, she died.
In March, her husband, Peter Ginnegar, filed a lawsuit against the center, the plastic surgeon Dr. Kendall Roehl, the anesthesiologist Dr. Yiu-Hei Ching, and two nurses, following his wife’s death.
Before Barbera’s surgery, the couple talked over FaceTime.
“She had this nice big smile on her face, and she’s like, ‘Love you,’” Ginnegar told People. “She saw herself, I think, coming out of the surgery with the body she wanted.”
Barbera reportedly wanted to undergo a multi-procedure makeover after losing significant weight.
Ginnegar told People that multiple doctors declined his wife’s wish to undergo six surgeries at once, stating that such a procedure would be too dangerous.
But then, he says, Barbera found Dr. Kendall Roehl on social media.
Ginnegar claims that after Dr. Roehl agreed to perform the procedures in one go, Barbera flew from North Carolina to Houston for the $53,000 operation.
“The doctor painted this Nirvana picture for Joy, and it’s what Joy wanted to hear,” Ginnegar said to People. “But unfortunately, Dr. Roehl didn’t live up to what she promised.”
Barbera’s surgery was originally scheduled for a later time, but was moved up after another patient canceled, he told the outlet.
Because of this change, Ginnegar was on a trip in Colorado during his wife’s surgery—a decision she encouraged.
The plan was that Barbera would recover for a week at the recovery center with a nurse, and Ginnegar would fly in to look after her for the second week.
According to Miller Weisbrod and Olesky, the law firm representing Ginnegar, Barbera’s operation took more than 10 hours.
The full-body transformation included Lipo 360 (liposuction targeting fat around the entire midsection), an abdominoplasty (also known as a tummy tuck), a Brazilian butt lift, a breast augmentation with implants, a circumferential body lift to contour the lower body, and an extended brachioplasty (also known as an arm lift).
The Brazilian butt lift, colloquially referred to as a BBL, is considered highly dangerous by many plastic surgeons, with some abstaining from the procedure completely. Botched star and renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Terry Dubrow famously refuses to perform BBLs.
“It’s the most dangerous procedure in plastic surgery because there are few veins in the buttock that connect to the main inferior vena cava going back to your heart,” he told E!’s Hot Goss in March. “If you inadvertently inject into it, you get a fat embolism.”
The couple’s next call was at 1 a.m., after the surgery, when Barbera called her husband from the hospital.
”She’s like, ‘Hey, babe, I want you to know I’m in the hospital. There’s something wrong with my stomach,’" he said.
Adding, “And I hear nurses in the background, I hear machines beeping, and then she’s like, ‘I got to go.’ I believe she was trying to warn me that things were messed up. And that’s the last time I heard from Joy.“
Ginnegar was worried for his wife and cut his trip short to go be with her, but before he got to Houston, he claims he received a phone call saying his wife was struggling to breathe.
Not long after, he claimed to have received another phone call declaring Barbera was brain-dead. He had to give permission for the doctors to stop attempting to revive her.
“Obviously, nothing will bring her back,” he said, adding that he was trying to do what his wife might have done had the roles been reversed. “To bring attention to the dangers of these types of surgeries in a non-hospital setting, first of all. And also, social media makes these things look so glamorous.”
Ginnegar also said patients did not know enough about the risks of plastic surgery. “The dangers, I don’t think, are being told to them the way they should be,” he said.
Citing an autopsy performed by the Harris County medical examiner, Miller Weiser Olesky said Barbera’s official cause of death was listed as “hemorrhagic shock following liposuction of abdomen, back, flanks, posterior arms with fat grafting to buttocks, circumferential body lift, bilateral mastopexy, bilateral breast augmentation, and left lower extremity lipoma excision.”
