Marina Deschapell, age 34, went to the Miami abortion facility at 620 SW 1st Street for a safe and legal six to eight week abortion on August 17, 1978. Eduardo F. Elias administered Valium and Xylocaine for the abortion.
Immediately after the procedure, Elias noticed that Marina was not breathing. He initiated CPR and an emergency team was summoned. The ambulance crew found Marina with no signs of life.
Although the medical examiner did not attribute Marina’s death directly to the abortion, police noted that the clinic, owned by Luis Bulas Barquet, was not equipped with any emergency equipment other than an air bag.

Barquet, an unlicensed doctor from Cuba, was a known criminal abortionist. After perpetrating some 11,000 criminal abortions in Cuba during the Batista regime, many of them on Florida women. He went to Florida as a refugee. There, he was arrested for abortion on April 5, 1961.He admitted that he’d been perpetrating between five and ten abortions per day in Miami motel rooms, charging $150 to $300, depending on how much he could get from a particular patient. He earned enough money in a seven-month period to buy a $25,000 home in Coral Gables, where he lived with his wife and two children.He was arrested in his car, which contained abortion equipment.(“Abortion Specialist Arrested,” The Miami News, April 6, 1961)

He resurfaced again in New York, where he was indicted for abortion in February of 1965. On June 30 of that same year, police raided his home in North Bergen, New Jersey, where they found three abortion patients. Barquet offered a bribe to the officers, who agreed to meet him at Kennedy Airport. Barquet, however, had notified the police of this incident of corruption, slipping away while the cops were arrested. (Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History, Angus McLaren, Harvard University Press, 2002)