CBS News
A dog tore off her upper lip. Five surgeries later, she’s a voice for others with facial injuries.
At 20 years old, Brooklinn Khoury knew she wanted to do something different with her life. She was teaching English as a second language courses, but she wanted to focus on her true passion: skateboarding.
For a while, everything was going just as she planned. Khoury was building a career in the worlds of both skateboarding and modeling, landing major sponsorships and being featured in Vogue. Through the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, she continued building her platform and honing her skills. She wanted to be a voice for women in the sport, and had garnered tens of thousands of social media followers who were invested in her journey.
In November 2020, her cousin invited her to take advantage of a cheap flight and visit her in Arizona. The visit was normal, and the biggest worry Khoury had was about a zit on her upper lip that she was cropping out of selfies sent to friends. Then, something Khoury still can’t identify triggered her cousin’s pit bull, a dog she had known for years.
The dog launched at her face, Khoury told CBS News, and bit down. The pit bull, which weighed “100-something pounds easily,” clamped its jaws around her upper lip and stayed there for nearly a minute. Khoury said that she was too startled to scream, but when she finally got the dog to release its grip, she saw “something fly on the wall and then fall to the floor.”
“It didn’t really hit that that was my lip. I couldn’t process that,” Khoury said. She didn’t realize the true extent of the damage for several minutes, when she opened her phone’s selfie camera to inspect what she thought might just be a deep cut. Instead, she found that “everything from the nose down was completely ripped off.”
Feeling “completely alone” and wanting better
Khoury immediately went to an area hospital, sitting alone in her room because of coronavirus restrictions on visitors while she waited for hours for a plastic surgeon to drive in. She scrolled through social media to see if she could find anyone else with a similar injury — and found nothing.
“I couldn’t find anybody that had no upper lip and was sharing a story or sharing a problem. I don’t want anyone to feel how I felt in that moment, which was just alone and very secluded,” Khoury said. “I picked up my phone and just started recording everything.”
Khoury detailed the time in the hospital and captured multiple images of the injury, even as her phone battery dwindled. She had thought the plastic surgeon might be able to reattach her lip, but it couldn’t be done: Instead, the injury was sewn up and the skin from the inside of her mouth was flipped to the outside to close the wound. It left her with no upper lip and massive scarring. Her teeth were visible even when her mouth was closed.
Just days after the surgery, Khoury was sharing photos and videos on social media. It was a huge change from the modeling photos and athletic shots she had previously been known for posting.
“I genuinely wanted to share my story. I felt so alone in the hospital … I needed a community of difference in a world of perfect,” Khoury said. “So I just made sure to be super vulnerable and have it be a safe space to post what I wanted to post. I just wanted somebody else, if they were going through it, to be able to relate.”
Finding help
Even as Khoury mentally prepared to “rock no lip” for the rest of her life, she hoped more could be done to bring her smile back. She said she saw dozens of doctors in the year after the accident, but was told that little could be done to fully restore her face. It wasn’t until she met Dr. Nicholas Do, a plastic surgeon at UCLA Health, that she finally felt hopeful again.
Do, who has extensive experience with microsurgery and craniofacial reconstruction, spent four hours with Khoury, answering every question she had and beginning to develop a plan to restore her face.
It wasn’t a simple process. Do told Khoury it would be multiple surgeries over the course of months, and said that it could take up to two years for the process to be completed. To repair the injury and return her face to its former appearance, Do merged a number of surgical techniques that have been developed over the decades. He even drove to a Hollywood special effects shop to get the supplies necessary to make casts of Khoury’s face so he could conduct trial runs of different surgical options.
The first of five surgeries took a piece of skin from Khoury’s wrist and attached it to where her upper lip had been. This created a thick, fleshy area that Do could connect to the blood vessels in the face and build the rest of the repair from. He compared the process to a sculptor finding a big chunk of marble, then carving a statue from it. The bulky skin changed Khoury’s speech, the way she ate, and more.
Brooklinn Khoury / UCLA Health
“I got so used to having no lip and I was so OK with what I looked like that I was actually scared for another change,” Khoury said.
Her lip stayed that way for several months. Then, a second surgery advanced skin through her nose, helping Khoury breathe bigger breaths and creating a better surgical area for Do to work within. The third surgery was a reconstructive rhinoplasty, which helped alter the appearance of Khoury’s nose and adjust the skin in the area. The fourth and fifth surgeries focused on refining Khoury’s lip.
When it was all done, Khoury’s face looked much closer to her original appearance. Khoury said when she looks at the photos she took immediately after the accident, she’s shocked by the difference.
“Now it’s something I look at and I’m like, ‘Oh God, I can’t even believe I went through that,'” Khoury said. “Then I look at my face now, and I’m so thankful and grateful that I look the way I do. If you were to tell me two years ago that I would have looked this way, I would have probably not believed anybody.”
Creating a community online
Khoury’s Instagram page has become the exact kind of account she looked for in the hours after being attacked. While undergoing the surgeries, she posted frequently about her life and spoke candidly about what she was going through. Many of the posts show her engaging in the same activities other women her age enjoy. Videos and photos show her trying out lipsticks and practicing skateboarding moves. In the comments, people share their own stories of reconstructive surgery.
“I can’t even believe how many people have shared their stories with me,” said Khoury. “It’s been such a beautiful experience. I felt so alone, and now I have such a beautiful community of people. … I felt so alone in the beginning, and now I have so many people sharing their stories.”
Paige Towers is part of that community. The 23-year-old was attacked by a dog in December 2023. She lost part of her lip and had multiple bites on her body. In the days after the attack, she was feeling overwhelmed and struggling to “accept that a part of my face was altered in a way” she never expected. While scrolling Instagram one day, she found Khoury’s page.
“I watched a reel about her experience and maybe stalked her account a bit,” Towers said. “I felt inspired by her journey and confident in my own. The fact that she could endure being attacked so severely and still press on with grace made me feel seen. … Her account only proved to further boost my own self-realization that my journey of healing from this trauma can happen and was happening.”
It’s not what Khoury expected, but more than four years after quitting her job, she has found the new life she was looking for.
“It trips me out every day,” Khoury said. “It’s a full circle.”
CBS News
Malaysia agrees to launch new search for MH370 plane, which vanished a decade ago with 239 people on board
Malaysia announced on Friday it has agreed to launch a new search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared 10 years ago in one of aviation’s greatest enduring mysteries.
The Boeing 777 carrying 239 people disappeared from radar screens on March 8, 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Despite the largest search in aviation history, the plane has never been found. Malaysia’s prime minister said 17 days after the plane disappeared that, based on the satellite data, his government had concluded that the plane crashed down in a remote corner of the Indian Ocean, and that there were no survivors.
Transport Minister Anthony Loke said Malaysia had agreed to a new search operation by maritime exploration firm Ocean Infinity, which also carried out an unsuccessful hunt in 2018.
The company’s first efforts followed a massive Australia-led search for the aircraft that lasted three years before it was suspended in January 2017.
Loke said a new 5,800 square mile area of the southern Indian Ocean would be scoured by Ocean Infinity, which is based in the United Kingdom and United States.
“The new search area proposed by Ocean Infinity is based on the latest information and data analysis conducted by experts and researchers,” Loke said.
“The proposal for a search operation by Ocean Infinity is a solid one and deserves to be considered,” he told reporters.
The government said it agreed to Ocean Infinity’s proposal “in principle” on December 13, with the transport ministry expected to finalize terms by early 2025.
The new search will resume “as soon as the contract is finalized and signed by both parties”, Loke said.
“They have informed us that the ideal time for the search in the designated waters is between January and April. We are working to finalise the agreement as quickly as possible,” he added.
“I truly hope there will be an end to the loss of MH370. May all questions be answered,” Malaysian Rosila Abu Samah, 60, the stepmother of one of the passengers, told AFP.
Supian Ahmad/NurPhoto/Getty
Malaysian Shim Kok Chau, 49, whose wife was a flight attendant on the ill-fated flight, said he had come to accept her fate but hopes to know what happened to the plane, “why it happened and who did it.”
Among the other victims was a celebrated group of 24 Chinese calligraphy artists coming from an exhibition of their work. Two young Iranian men on the plane, 18-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad and 29-year-old Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza, were traveling on stolen passports to seek better lives in Europe.
Two of the U.S. citizens on the plane were young children, Nicole Meng, 4, and 2-year-old Yan Zhang.
Philip Wood was the only American adult on the flight. The IBM executive had been living in Beijing and was planning to relocate to the Malaysian capital with his girlfriend, Sarah Bajc.
“No find, no fee”
The new search will be on the same “no find, no fee” principle as Ocean Infinity’s previous search, with the government only paying out if they find the aircraft.
The contract is for 18 months and Malaysia will pay $70 million to the company if the plane is found, Loke said.
He said the decision to agree to a fresh search “reflects the Malaysian government’s commitment to continuing the search operation and providing closure to the families of the MH370 victims.”
The original Australia-led search covered 120,000 square kilometers in the Indian Ocean but found hardly any trace of the plane, with only some pieces of debris picked up.
In July 2015, an airplane fragment later confirmed to be a flaperon from MH370 was found washed ashore on the western Indian Ocean island of Reunion. It was the first hard evidence that the plane had gone down in the area. More debris was later found washed up on the coast of eastern Africa.
YANNICK PITOU/AFP/Getty Images
The plane’s disappearance has long been the subject of theories — including that veteran pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah had gone rogue.
A final report into the tragedy released in 2018 pointed to failings by air traffic control and said the course of the plane was changed manually.
Asked if he was confident the plane will be found during the new search, Loke said: “At this point, no one can provide guarantees.
“It has been over 10 years, and it would be unfair to expect a concrete commitment. However, under the terms and conditions, any discovery must be credible. It cannot just be a few fragments; there are specific criteria outlined in the contract.”
A Utah mother who police believe was shot and killed by her husband along with three of their children was a refugee who fled violence in Myanmar and dreamed of thriving with her family in the U.S., relatives said Thursday.
Police believe the husband killed his family before shooting himself, and a teenage son was badly wounded.
The bodies of Bu Meh, 38, along with her daughters Kristina Ree, 8, and Nyay Meh, 2, and son Boe Reh, 11, were found in their home in West Valley City, a Salt Lake City suburb, on Tuesday. A handgun was found under the father Dae Reh, 42, leading police to believe this was a murder-suicide, but no evidence of a motive has been released.
One child, 17-year-old Sha Reh, survived being shot in the head and is hospitalized with a severe brain injury, police said.
Bu Meh, a member of Myanmar’s Karenni ethnic minority, fled what her relatives described as ethnic cleansing in the Southeast Asian nation about 10 years ago. She and her small family lived for a time in a refugee camp in Thailand, then came to the United States “with little more than the clothing on their backs,” the family said in a statement.
She taught herself English, learned new skills and worked hard to support her growing family, achieving a way of life “far beyond the nightmare of her former country or the refugee camp,” the family said.
“For reasons that we cannot comprehend, her husband robbed her and their children of that security and their very lives,” her family said.
Police believe the shooting happened over the weekend.
Police initially went to the home Monday night after a relative asked them to check on the family but did not find any sign of an emergency that would allow them to enter the home. The relative went to the home Tuesday, saw Sha Reh wounded in the garage and called police, who found the bodies inside the home.
In their statement, relatives called Sha Reh their hero and said he faces a “long and complex road to recovery.” An online fundraiser is collecting donations to pay for his care and to help him go to college.
“After moving into their own home and finally enjoying a level of prosperity far beyond the nightmare of their former country or the refugee camp in Thailand in which they lived for a season, and for reasons that we cannot comprehend,” the family wrote, “her husband robbed her and their children of that security and their very lives.”
Neighbors hadn’t reported any gunshots in the area over the weekend, police spokesperson Roxeanne Vainuku said at a news conference Wednesday. The family had no previous reports of domestic violence or other disturbances.
One neighbor spoke to CBS affiliate KUTV about the shock they felt.
“How can a father shoot his children?” neighbor Mike Webster told the station. “I just can’t grasp for that concept at all. I can just see that poor little two-year-old looking at her daddy.”
This Utah case is the 38th mass killing in the United States this year. At least 165 people have died this year in U.S. mass killings, which are defined by the FBI as cases in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer.
Mark Barden, whose child was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, urged Utah lawmakers to pass Red Flag laws after the incident in Utah, KUTV reported.
“When it is recognized that an individual is in crisis, measures to safely and temporarily remove firearms from their possession are proven to save lives,” Barden said.
A journalists’ association says two journalists working for Kurdish media outlets were killed in northern Syria while covering fighting between Turkish-backed fighters and Syrian Kurdish militia.
The Turkey-based Dicle-Firat Journalists Association said Friday that Nazim Dastan and Cihan Bilgin were killed Thursday when their vehicle was reportedly targeted by a Turkish drone on a road near the Tishrin Dam.
Tishrin Dam, located some 56 miles east of Aleppo, has been the scene of clashes between the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, SDF, and the Turkey-backed opposition forces.
There was no immediate comment from Turkish officials.
Bianet, a news website dedicated to human rights issues, said Bilgin was a reporter for the Kurdish Hawar News Agency, while Dastan worked as a freelance journalist for the Firat News Agency, which is associated with the militant group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Turkey considers the SDF a terrorist organization because its main component is a group aligned to the PKK.
The group has been engaged in an armed struggle against the Turkish state since the 1980s in pursuit of its objective of securing autonomy for Kurds in the country.