After Mr. McAllister got drawn into the MRI scanner, the situation went from ‘bad’ to ‘worse’ when the quench button purportedly failed to turn off the MRI’s magnetic field. This episode delves into the quench button and its function… who made it… who installed it… who maintained it… and what liabilities they might face.
In MRI safety, the quench button is the last resort when accidents happen and someone is pinned against the MRI scanner. It is rare, but not unheard of, that this MRI emergency button would fail. So if the Nassau Open MRI quench button did malfunction, who made it? Who serviced this emergency button? Do they have a contributing role in the fatal MRI accident that killed Keith McAllister?
While the lawsuit isn’t yet filed for this deadly MRI, this episode investigates the claim of the MRI quench button failure, and works to identify what parties might have legal responsibility if it didn’t work as intended.
Show Notes:
Siemens Adverse Event Report to the US FDA
Interview with Adrienne Jones-McAllister from Long Island News 12
Google Street View of Nassau Open MRI
Transcript:
“Do something, just turn this damn thing off!”
“I’m trying! I’m pushing the button, but it’s not working!”
“Turn off the machine, call 911!”
“I’m trying, this is supposed to work!”
Hello, and welcome back to the Invisible Force Podcast. This podcast series is built around exploring MRI incidents and accidents that often get described incorrectly in your local news or online stories as being somehow freak accidents.
Our entire first season is dedicated to an accident you heard about on the news, to say nothing of previous episodes of this podcast. A man who died in an MRI accident out on Long Island, New York, just last year in July of 2025. In this accident, Mr. Keith McAllister died after he got pulled into an MRI scanner at Nassau Open MRI by a 20-pound steel chain around his neck. Before we get into this episode, let’s reintroduce you to the co-hosts of our podcast.
I’m John Posh, MRI technologist, educator and longtime advocate of MRI safety practices. I’m also adjunct faculty at two universities and teach MRI safety multiple times per year.
I’m Toby Gilk. I’m a certified MRI safety officer, certified MRI safety expert, MRI facility architect, safety consultant and co-author of a new MRI safety textbook, The Technologist’s MRI Safety Handbook.
Before we jump into this episode though, let’s take a look back a couple of episodes ago when we described the runaround that we were getting from the state of New York’s Department of Health. When you listen to episode five, you heard us describing the combination of both gas lighting and stonewalling that we were getting from the Department of Health. You’ve also heard us talk about the New York State freedom of information laws in the context of requesting information from Nassau County and how the county was requiring a notarized statement from an involved person before they’d release any of the requested information. Well, these FOIL laws not only apply to cities and counties, but they also apply to the New York State government. Back before Christmas, we requested, records of all discussions, internal and external to New York State Department of Health, correspondence, reports, memos, notes, recordings, both audio and video, pertaining to A, identification slash exploration of New York State regulation or lack thereof for MRI safety at the point of care, B, circumstances surrounding the fatal MRI accident which occurred on Long Island in July of 2025 at Nassau Open MRI in which Mr. Keith McAllister died, and all discussions of state investigations into the incident, and all discussions of potential or actual state responses to the incident, whether investigatory, policy, regulatory, or engagement with subject matter experts or the public.
In the acknowledgement of our Freedom of Information Law or FOIL request, the New York State Department of Health wrote back immediately, and they said, quote, “a determination as to whether your request is granted or denied will be reached. In approximately 20 business days on January 22nd, 2026.” And then, like clockwork, on January 22nd, the date they said they’d have information for us, we got another email, “Please be advised, this office is unable to respond to your request by the date previously given to you. We are working diligently to identify or redact records responsive to your request. The Records Access Office now expects to complete its process by March 9th, 2026.” And in a million years, you’ll never guess what the letter that we got on March 9th, 2026, what that letter said. It said, Quote, “This office is unable to respond to your request by the date previously given to you. The Records Access Office now expects to complete its process by April 20, 2026.” So we’re hoping that they won’t push this back yet again, and that soon we’ll have at least a little peek behind the curtain of the New York State Department of Health and what they’ve been thinking about this tragic accidents that potentially, they could have helped prevent it. We’re continuing to follow every pathway to get the information that tells the most complete and accurate version of the story, including what has or hasn’t been happening in the New York Capitol to protect all of us in the future.
In our last episode, we talked a lot about the McAllisters and how just a few days after the accident, they engaged an attorney and then another attorney, and how since that time they’ve been radio silent, not making any comments in the press. Through their attorney, we also learned that the family is not supporting the release of public record information, like the original 911 call that we took our best guess at in the radio play that opened our very first episode. They’re not releasing incident reports, body camera footage, or the collected security camera footage. That has us asking, what they don’t want seen? In that episode, we also discussed the legal maneuvering that we think was happening within the McAllister family. But of course, they’re not the only sides in the legal dispute that surely is brewing here. This episode, entitled Supporting Cast of Litigants, will be about some of the other players. Now the other central player, Nassau Open MRI, will be the subject of our next episode. In this episode, we’re going to fill in some details of a couple of other members of the supporting cast between McAllister and Nassau Open MRI that are going to help us make some deductions about what happened. We’re going to start with the third-party MRI servicing company.
You should remember from our prior episodes that Intermed’s service engineer who ran from the other outpatient imaging center across to Nassau Open MRI when the people at Nassau location, when they weren’t able to get the magnet to quench. Sometime after the service engineer arrived on site, neighbors reported seeing a giant plume of white smoke, what they described, come out of the back of the building. While a plume of white smoke might indicate the election of a new pope of Long Island, that description really matches exactly what we would expect people to describe following a quench. So was the Intermed service engineer the hero of our story? Or did somehow they neglect their responsibilities to check the quench button?
A quick plug for our tip line. If you know any of the details about the MRI trailer that we’re missing, or anything else related to this tragedy, please either send us a tip to our website, invisibleforcepodcast.com, or leave us a voicemail on our tip line, 631-MRI-TIPS. That’s 631-674-8477. We’ll repeat those again at the end of this episode.
So previously, we’ve introduced you to Intermed, the third-party service company who sent their service engineer to Nassau Open MRI. In the first half of this program, we’re going to talk a bit more about Intermed and the quote-unquote rescue mission to quench the MRI scanner at Nassau Open MRI. And they’re part of keeping that piece of the MRI system, the quench button, working.
First, let’s discuss the potentially tangled web of responsibility for the function of that quench button. The quench button is part of the MRI system, which means that it’s made by the company that makes the actual MRI scanner. In the case of our story, the manufacturer is Siemens. But the quench button isn’t on the MRI scanner directly. It’s a button or a console button that’s typically mounted on the wall in the control room, the MRI scan room, or potentially both locations. It needs to be wired back from its location on the wall to somewhere inside the MRI scanner itself. This means it needs to be integrated into the construction of the building or, in the case of the magnet at Nassau Open MRI, fabricated into the construction and design of the semi-trailer.
So there could potentially be nothing wrong with the quench button itself, but if it was improperly wired back to the MRI scanner in the construction of the trailer by the company that built it out, then it’s still not going to work. According to the details in Siemens’ adverse event report to the US FDA, this MRI scanner was purchased used, and it was sighted in the semi-trailer by someone other than Siemens. So there was likely a used equipment reseller or agent involved, and maybe the equipment wasn’t used gently by the previous owner before it got resold. So maybe, just maybe, there’s a question of wear and tear on the quench button and its wiring, and whether or not it worked.
According to Google Street View Images, it appears that the MRI trailer in the accident started being used at Nassau Open MRI sometime between August of 2019, when an older trailer shows up in the Street View Images, and December of 2021, when the new one appears, the one that was used until the time of the incident. Now, we don’t know if Intermit had responsibility for the care and feeding of the MRI scanner from when it first showed up sometime between 2019 and 2021, but it appears that at the time of the accident, they were the ones taking care of the MRI scanner, a part of which obviously is the quench button. The takeaway here is that if the quench button was broken, as appears to be the case, while it was presumably owned by Nassau County Open MRI and serviced by Intermit, there were a lot of other hands that this MRI scanner and trailer passed through prior to July of 2025. If the quench button was broken, we don’t know if that’s the way it was when they purchased the trailer or if it happens sometimes after that.
A few notes about Siemens quench buttons. We were contacted by a former service engineer who had experience with Siemens MRI systems who reached out to us after one of our prior episodes. And this service engineer had experience not only with Siemens, but specifically with the Siemens Esprit, the MRI system in which the McAllister accident occurred. This source gave us two really important pieces of information about this system and the design of the quench button. First, the Siemens Flying Saucer type quench button, so named because literally it looks like a giant flying saucer nailed to the wall. This type of quench button has both a testable quench switch, tested at the button, make sure that the button buttons, and there are all sorts of fail safes to let people know ahead of time that there may be a problem with the quench button’s function. And we don’t have any information about whether there were any fail safe indicators at Nassau Open MRI before this incident. The second thing this person told us about the quench button was that while there are ways to test the quench button, the switch, the flying saucer doohickey itself, there really isn’t a way to test the quench function, at least not without quenching the magnet, which obviously we don’t want to do casually. While it’s technically possible that the quench button worked as intended and the magnet failed to quench because of something inside the MRI scanner, the magnet itself, well, that’s on the extreme end of unlikely.
Think of it like a light switch in your home, one that could save someone’s life, but one where if the light bulb turns on, even for a split second, it costs you probably $50,000 or more. Now it would be really important to make sure that switch worked when you needed it. So you’d probably check to make sure that the power was going to the switch and that the switch worked switching on and off other things besides the life-saving light bulb. You’d test it and you’d know that every part of the system upstream of that light bulb itself was working just fine. And because the light bulb has never been turned on, the odds are very good that it’s not burned out and that it will in fact light up when you actually send power to it. But you can’t be 100% sure without testing it and actually testing it is extremely expensive and disruptive.
Within a few weeks of the original incident, we had tracked down Intermed’s regional field service manager with responsibility for the New York area. After a few unreturned voicemails and emails, eventually that regional field service manager, Steve Richardson, redirected us towards Intermed’s attorney, Edward Schwendeman and the firm Goldberg Sagala. We sent a handful of questions about the incident to Mr. Schwendeman and reached out several times. To date, he hasn’t even bothered to tell us to go pound sand. We’re getting the silent treatment. It turns out we’re getting a whole lot of the silent treatment.
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The other supporting cast member that we wanted to highlight in this episode is the manufacturer of the MRI scanner into which Mr. McAllister got sucked and entrapped, Siemens. For those of you not in the world of radiology, Siemens is one of those companies that seems to make damn near everything. Trains, building control systems, and yes, even MRI scanners. Today, in 2026, Siemens is probably the market leader in terms of new MRI systems sold globally.
Siemens was the OEM, the original equipment manufacturer of the 1.5 Tesla MRI scanner that was at the heart of our story. Siemens actually makes many different models of MRIs, and the model in that semi-trailer at Nassau Open MRI was a product they no longer sell. It was called the Siemens Esprit. When we talk about Siemens making the MRI, that might lead you to think that they just make the big donut-shaped scanner part. But the MRI system also involves a lot of separate computers and amplifiers, signal processors, fans, wiring connections, all of the various bits and parts in site-specific customer arrangements. One of the bits that Siemens makes and supplies with their MRI systems, and this is true for all of the MRI manufacturers, is the quench button that you heard us talk about a few times before.
As a reminder, while Siemens originally made this MRI scanner, they didn’t sell the scanner or the semi-trailer to Nassau Open MRI. Nassau bought these from used equipment vendors. This really isn’t too different from buying a used Toyota Camry from Trusty Earl’s Discount Car Lot. Yes, Toyota made the car, but when it gets resold, Trusty Earl has some skin in the game, too. Siemens contends in their FDA Adverse Event Report that they had nothing to do with the installation of the MRI inside that trailer. That was done by the used MRI version of Trustee Earle, but if you bought that used Toyota Camry and a month later, the engine burst into flames while you were driving to your favorite Thursday night poetry slam, you might want to hold both Toyota and Trusty Earl responsible for that roadside hibachi that used to be your ride. We’re still digging into this story to try and identify who this event’s Trusty Earl is. We know that Siemens is entangled in this and we know that they know that they’re entangled.
But before we talk about Siemens’ part in the story, since we’re talking about lawyers and potential lawsuits in this episode, we want to give you a remarkably on-point piece of lawsuit history in the state of New York. You may remember from a previous episode that we mentioned another fatal MRI accident that happened in New York in 2001. In that incident, a six-year-old boy, Michael Colombini, was positioned for an MRI scan that was just about to start when a nurse and anesthesiologist brought a steel oxygen tank into the MRI scan room. That tank was attracted by the MRI scanner, flew like a missile, hitting young Michael Colombini in the head. The young boy died of the injuries. The story is more complicated than that. We’ve been talking about doing a series on that as well, but the important part here is that the attracted metal object killing someone. That’s the key here. In that prior accident, GE Healthcare was the maker of that MRI, and the company was one of the initially named defendants in the Michael Colombini lawsuit.
In that lawsuit two decades ago, the Colombini family’s attorneys named the hospital where the accident occurred, GE Healthcare, who made the MRI scanner, as well as nurses, doctors, managers, and the MRI technologists all as defendants in that case. Over the course of several years of litigation, in various pretrial hearings and motions, the judge dismissed different defendants from the suit. That didn’t stop the lawsuit from going forward, it just excused some of the parties from any kind of civil liability. The resulting settlement amount would have to get split up among fewer remaining defendants. For our current story, the important piece of the Colombini suit was that the New York judge, in that case, they dismissed GE as the defendant, essentially saying that GE could not be held legally liable for the actions of the people attending to the Young Boys MRI exam, the people who let that steel oxygen tank fly in. That’s vitally important to us because it establishes an almost perfect legal precedent for our situation. In the state of New York, MRI manufacturers aren’t legally liable for the actions of MRI providers when somebody gets killed because of a magnetically attracted object. That would seem to be a get out of jail free, really a get out of civil liability free card. That would seem to be that card for Siemens for a fatal MRI case in New York. Perfect legal precedent. Now, neither one of us are aware of any similar lawsuits or legal precedent in any other state. Of course, it is beyond awful that this accident happened at all, but for Siemens, the fact that it happened in New York where there’s a hugely protective legal precedent, well, that kind of appears to be a small stroke of luck.
So, if under New York state legal precedent, Siemens knows they’re not going to be held liable for the actions of Nassau Open MRI staffers, it would then seem that there would be no real rush to assemble a defense team. So imagine our surprise when the attorneys representing Siemens called exactly one week after the accident, urgently looking for an MRI safety expert witness.
Late in the afternoon, July 23rd, a week to the day after the accident, and just six days after Mr. McAllister was pronounced dead, I got an urgent sounding email from an attorney, Eric Goldberg, with the firm Littleton Joyce, who said he was representing Siemens. Now, in the moment, he didn’t say that this was related to the McAllister case, but he seemed to suggest that he was in a real rush to get an MRI safety expert secured for that case. He asked, was I available? After a few back and forth e-mails, he called me apologizing, saying that he was sorry for a fire drill, but that one of his associates had secured an expert and that they didn’t need me after all. He thanked me for my time and we hung up. And I realized that I hadn’t asked him while we were on the phone. I sent a follow up e-mail saying, hey, was this related to the McAllister death? But he never responded to that question.
So at the time, you knew it was a Siemens MRI that was in the Nassau Open MRI trailer where Mr. McAllister got pulled in though, right?
Yeah. I knew it was Siemens.
But there was nothing beyond just that coincidence that indicated that this particular attorney representing Siemens was calling about the McAllister case.
At the time, it was only coincidence. But within a couple of days, little serendipity led me to confirm my suspicions and find out that yeah, he was reaching out to me about the McAllister accident. You remember from the previous episode when we were talking about the McAllister family’s new attorney, Michael Lauterborn. This was before his associates very politely told me to go pound sand. I was talking with Mr. Lauterborn and I asked him if Siemens was involved in the case. He said that yes, he was having trouble, however, remembering the firm’s name, Joyce something or other. Littleton Joyce, I said. Yeah, that’s the firm. Was Eric Goldberg the lead attorney? Yeah. How do you know that? That may have been the one and only useful piece of information Mr. Lauterborn shared with me, that Siemens had, in fact, lawyered up and that it was the attorney who had contacted me just a few days before, were eager to try and find an MRI safety expert witness.
But given what we know about New York State precedent and the protections that the Colombini case decisions identified, Siemens should not have been particularly worried or rushed about having to defend themselves about the cause of the accident. There was only one thing that made sense to us that explained their rush to get a full defense team together so quickly. Our suspicion was that the family was accusing Siemens of having a defective quench button, and Siemens was preparing to defend against that claim, which wouldn’t have the protections of the precedent from the prior Colombini case.
Remember from our prior episodes how we told you that the authorized distributor for GE MRI scanners in India for years purportedly installed quench buttons for GE magnets, but never actually wired them to the MRI system? The quench buttons on the wall in those installations were kind of like the thermostat in my office. Yeah, I can go up and adjust the temperature setting, but I am certain it doesn’t actually change the amount of heating or cooling that comes into my office. In the case of my office thermostat, it’s essentially a dummy. We believe that the McAllister attorneys were making similar accusations that the quench button in the trailer at Nassau Open MRI was effectively a non-functional dummy that ought to have worked, but didn’t.
Even if it was true that the quench button failed to work on that fateful day in July of 2025, as discussed in the first half of the show, there were several companies who had some sort of responsibility for that quench button, its installation, its functionality over the life of that trailer. Tying our two supporting cast members together in this episode, for many Siemens quench buttons, there are regular preventative maintenance checks. I think it’s routinely done annually by Siemens when you’re under a service contract with them for your MRI system, and they actually test the functionality of the quench button. Now, we don’t yet know if the quench button was verified as functional when Nassau Open MRI took possession of the trailer, or if Intermed conducted the same scheduled maintenance checks of the quench button that Siemens would have done. Remember from the first half of this episode, it is possible to test the quench button switch, but we simply can’t count on that part that triggers the quench inside the MRI scanner to do its part when we push the button. That part of the system can’t be tested without significant cost.
At first, it made no sense to us why Siemens was so eager to get attorneys and experts all lined up within a week of the accident, particularly with, as John mentioned, the Colombini case, and it was such a strong on-point legal precedent that presumably would have provided Siemens with a large amount of protection against claims that somehow they were responsible for the actions of Nassau Open MRI or their personnel. But when word started to leak out that there was a question about whether or not the quench button actually worked, all of a sudden Siemens rushed to lawyer up, made a whole lot of sense.
Now for everyone having a mini panic attack about the prospect of a quench button not working if you or a loved one ever needed it during an MRI, there’s lots of accounts of MRI scanners being quenched. You can go to YouTube and find dozens of videos as MRIs are generally quenched at the end of life before they’re de-installed. People film these all the time. They’re also used in emergencies, thankfully not all that frequently, and it would be a big deal if they didn’t work as intended. We’ve shared stories with you that we know of about when they didn’t work, and those stories that we know of always had to do with the wiring of the quench button circuit, not a failure of a part inside the MRI scanner itself, like what was implied here.
So we’re left questioning the function of the quench button, which does have a regular testing regime and built-in fail safes, or we’re left with what truly sounds like a one in a million long shot that the part that triggers the quench from inside the MRI scanner failed to work when the button was pushed. These possibilities would seem to implicate the unknown used MRI equipment vendor who sold the MRI scanner and semi-trailer to Nassau Open MRI, or potentially Intermed who serviced the MRI scanner, or Siemens who made the MRI scanner and quench button. But what if the quench button wasn’t actually ever triggered? What if the entire tragedy could have been over in seconds and Mr. McAllister’s death prevented? In our next episode, we’re going to share with you some astounding details that we learned from the most unlikely source imaginable.
“Do something, turn this damn thing off!”
“I’m trying, I’m pushing the button down, but it’s not working.”
“Turn off the machine, call 911!”
“I’m trying, this is supposed to work!”
Next episode, we’re going to switch our focus to Nassau Open MRI and the new name that the company is operating under. We’ll also look at the MRI technologist who is running Mrs. Jones McAllister’s MRI scan and whether or not the quench button was pushed in a timely manner. So make sure that you’re subscribed to Invisible Force podcast to get the next episode as soon as it drops.
For this week’s show, our sources were the Siemens adverse event to the US FDA, phone calls and emails with Intermed’s regional service manager Steve Richardson and Intermed’s attorney Ed Schwendeman, Siemens attorney Eric Goldberg, and a few details from the McAllister family attorney Michael Lauderborn, as well as some confidential sources.
Our introductory audio play is a montage of audio taken from Long Island News Channel 12 interview with Mrs. Jones McAllister and our voice actor Mischa Stanton.
If you have any information about the incident or any MRI accidents, please reach out to us through our website invisibleforcepodcast.com. There you’ll also find episodes, show notes and a tip line contact, which is always there. Also, you can leave us a voicemail with information about this incident. The phone in tip line is 631-MRI-TIPS. That number again is 631-MRI-TIPS or 674-8477.
We also ask that you like and share our podcast with your friends and colleagues. With your help, we’ll unravel the mystery of what happened and with a little bit of luck we’ll help make sure that accidents like this don’t ever occur again.
