Around 7:30 p.m. On Saturday, November 10, a woman dialed 911 from an address in Playa del Rey, a funky beachfront neighborhood in Los Angeles. In a recording of the call, she tells dispatchers she’s with someone who is recovering from breast surgery and may have had a heart attack. “She’s not breathing, she’s not breathing,” the caller says. “I’m trying to do CPR. She’s cold and clammy.”

The minutes tick by. Another woman frantically yells, “Dr. West! Dr. West! Please wake up! C’mon, c’mon! Dr. West!” The caller cries that the patient is about to roll out of bed. Someone starts hyperventilating. Someone else focuses long enough to send two puffs of air into the patient’s lungs.

Within an hour, Dr. Donda West, the 58-year-old professor and mother of rapper and hip-hop producer Kanye West, would be pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. An autopsy three days later proved inconclusive. Two months later, the Los Angeles County medical examiner would issue a report noting that West had coronary artery disease and suffered complications from the trio of surgeries—a breast enhancement, a tummy tuck, and liposuction—that she underwent the day before she died. Yet the report did not specify the cause of death.

Long before that medical uncertainty, Donda West’s bizarre demise had been turned into a celebrity whodunit. West was, after all, not just the mother of one of the world’s most successful hip-hop artists, but something of a celebrity as a result. In 2005, Kanye had made her famous with the song, “Hey Mama,” in which he rapped,

I said Mommy I’ma love you til you don’t hurt no more

And when you get older, you ain’t gotta work no more

And I’ma gonna get you that mansion we couldn’t afford

See you’re unbreakable, unmistakable, highly capable …

The gritty single mom had become a tragic heroine, and it didn’t take long for the dirt-diggers at TMZ.com, the popular gossip site, to identify a villain: West’s cosmetic surgeon, the Harvard-educated physician Jan Adams.

It’s not clear when or how West first met Jan Adams, or why she chose him, when she could have had any plastics guy in L.A.. Glenda Lee, her longtime friend and Kanye’s godmother, told investigators that West consulted with four doctors before choosing Adams. One rumor held that Oprah Winfrey, who had once featured Adams on her show, had recommended him to West, but Winfrey categorically denied it.

Whatever the case, Adams gave every appearance of being a skilled doctor and upstanding man. He grew up raised by a single mother in Middletown, an Ohio steel town. His intelligence and football prowess carried him to Cambridge. After finishing in 1978, Adams returned for medical school at Ohio State, followed by a residency at Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital and plastic and reconstructive surgery training at the University of Michigan. In 1992, he arrived in L.A.to begin a fellowship in aesthetic surgery at UCLA, and, within a few years, he was practicing out of a plush Beverly Hills office. In 2000, he published a book, Everything Women of Color Should Know About Cosmetic Surgery, and, in October 2003, he appeared on Oprah to plug his new Discovery Channel show, Plastic Surgery Before and After.

TMZ’s bloggers quickly recast Adams as a fraud. He wasn’t a "Beverly Hills doctor," the site said: He practiced out of an outpatient clinic above a Kinko’s in a strip mall. He had a record of conflict with medical authorities and patients. In April 2007, the California medical board filed papers seeking the suspension of Adams’ medical license following two DUI pleas, one in 2003 and another in 2006. Court records showed that Adams owed $750,000 in civil malpractice settlements, including about $150,000 to a woman who claimed that, in a 1996 surgery, Adams left a sponge in one of her breasts. Another patient charged that Adams sent her home immediately after a tummy tuck and breast lift; she produced photographs of gaping wounds and ragged scars alleged to be Adams’ handiwork. Adams turned out not to be board-certified in plastic surgery, and a malpractice suit filed in March 2007 alleged that he lied about that fact to a patient.

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