OK, it was a horrible MRI accident, but does that mean that there’s no accountability? In this episode our hosts break down the errors they’ve seen, as well as offering their takes on what they believe both civil and criminal liabilities might be.
In this episode our hosts, John Posh and Tobias Gilk, put on their pretend lawyer or MRI expert witness hats and discuss what legal duties or liability might be shouldered by Nassau Open MRI, the radiologist, and the MRI technologist. The hosts find that all three had duties to MRI safety that appear to not have been met, creating potential civil liability.
The host pair also look into New York criminal law, identifying whether there’s sufficient information to consider charging the three with criminally negligent homicide for the MRI death of Mr. Keith McAllister.
Show Notes:
Incident leaked security camera video
Lawsuit: Ronald Mazza (GM Partners Westbury) vs. Brian & Jason Goldbert (Nassau Open MRI)
Attorney Letter announcing closing of Nassau Open MRI and scanner inspection
Lawsuit: Adrienne Jones-McAllister vs. Nassau Open MRI
Transcript:
“He waved goodbye to me, and then his whole body went limp.”
“I’m just surprised that they didn’t happen. That really made me upset, because that should never happen.”
“I think that they should have had better precautions, like how that even happened, how they even get to that point.”
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 local news or in online stories as, quote unquote, freak accidents.
This entire first season is dedicated to an accident you’ve heard about, a man who died in an MRI accident in July of 2025 out on Long Island, New York. In this accident, Mr. Keith McAllister died after he got pulled into an MRI scanner by a 20 pound chain that was around his neck. This happened at Nassau Open MRI.
Now, before we pick up our story from the prior episode, this is a great time to reintroduce you to the co-hosts for the 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.
And I’m Toby Gilk, certified MRI safety officer, certified MRI safety expert, MRI facility architect, safety consultant, and one of the co-authors of a new MRI safety textbook, The Technologist’s MRI Safety Handbook.
So in some ways, this episode is the one that John and I have been itching to do from the very beginning. To date, we’ve mostly been sharing with you details of the incident, what happened, who was involved, what they were saying about their involvement, and I’m sure it’s seeped in, but as we’ve been talking about the details, mostly we’ve been trying to keep from interjecting our individual opinions on what should or shouldn’t have happened, or who does or doesn’t have some direct responsibility. Now, while both John and I have served as expert witnesses for other MRI cases, neither of us are experts for this case. That being said, we’re going to spend much of this episode sharing opinions of what we would say if we were serving as experts.
Before we jump into the meat of this episode, we want to share with you a little bit about our own internal discussions. What exactly do we call this event? You may have noticed in prior episodes that we bounced back and forth between calling this an accident or an incident or an event. I want to just clear the air about this before we get into the episode where we talk a lot about the responsibilities or accountabilities. When we describe this as an accident, we do that because we firmly believe nobody intended for this to happen. But we also know that many times when something gets labeled as an accident, some people want to take that as absolution. There’s no responsibility that the fact that it was unintentional means we can’t assign responsibility or accountability or blame for certain actions. If you came to this episode with the understanding that something called accident means you can’t have accountability, we ask that you set that definition aside for the next 25 minutes or so, because while this was an accident, you’re about to learn how we still think there’s a lot of accountability to be had.
In the first half of this episode, we’re going to be discussing the civil proceedings. Essentially, that’s when people or organizations are suing one another. As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, you sue to try and recover damages or compensation, or you sue to compel some sort of action. But you or me or even a company can’t sue to put someone in jail. In the second half of this program, we’re going to be discussing criminal proceedings, and that’s the government taking action, which can result in penalties or administrative actions, and in the more extreme cases, jail time.
At their most basic, there are two teams in a lawsuit. There’s the plaintiff or the person bringing the suit. This is the person who’s claiming that they have been harmed or wronged in some way, and they want the other party, the defendant, to fix it. In this civil suit arising from a harm that was the death of Mr. Keith McAllister, it is his wife, Ms. Jones-McAllister, who is the plaintiff. On the defense side, there’s actually a small group of companies who have each been named as defendants. Nassau Open MRI, East Coast Radiology, Sun Enterprises, and GM Partners Westbury. There are lots of ways that lawsuits get complicated, but for the moment, let’s just stick with the notion that there are two teams involved. Each individual or company in the lawsuit is entitled to their own legal representation too.
In this process, the plaintiff, in our case, Mrs. Jones-McAllister, files what’s called a complaint, the document that kicks off the lawsuit. Now, you or I or anybody can file a suit for just about anything that we want to claim has harmed us in any way. The hurdle, if you want to call it that, to file a lawsuit is practically non-existent. If you can pay the filing fee, you can pretty much sue anyone for pretty much anything. As an example, John, your Grateful Dead tie-dye T-shirt is so bright that I think it’s distorted my color perception for the rest of my life. So I’m suing you for $11 bajillion. Now, just because you make a claim in the complaint document that kicks off a lawsuit does not mean that the courts will uphold your claim of harm.
In your hypothetical, the judge would tell you that my tie-dye T-shirt is a work of art and that only a Philistine like yourself would fail to appreciate it.
Or even if the court did agree that there was harm, they might not agree with the claim of damages.
Your Honor, how about instead of $11 bajillion, I get the wussy-eyed plaintiff a pair of discounted sunglasses that he can put on when I’m wearing my tie-dye T-shirt?
The point is that initial complaints tell the story from a very specific perspective of people who have serious interests in you understanding the way things happened in a way that most favors them. Plaintiffs typically paint a picture of how awful something was. The defendants come back with, well, it’s really not that bad, and even if it was, it’s somebody else’s fault.
Another essential part about lawsuits is the formal information gathering or discovery process. When people or companies are suing one another, they will be legally compelled to share information that is relevant to the dispute. The judge gets to set boundaries on what one party can get from the others, so it’s not a complete free for all. But you can only get court ordered discovery from a named party in the lawsuit. Not everyone named in the suit needs to have pockets and be a target for a large cash settlement. Naming someone as a defendant is typically necessary for court ordered discovery from them. In an MRI accident, it’s fairly common for plaintiffs to name everyone in their brother, the MRI techs, the radiologists, the manager, in addition to the companies involved. Often these people who have a much smaller share of the overall legal responsibility and less cash to contribute to any eventually decided settlement get released as defendants once they’ve given up all the information that they have.
In health care lawsuits, particularly where someone gets harmed while receiving medical care, the actions of the health care workers and the company that employs them are measured against the standard of care, which is meant to be the yardstick for how people involved in the accident ought to have acted. Standard of care is often defined as what a similarly trained person would have done in this situation. But that can be super subjective.
Because if you ask 100 people what they would have done in that situation, you’re likely to get 100 slightly different answers. Courts greatly prefer to tie individual responses back to some timely, professionally approved standard from a major governmental or professional organization to anchor the standard of care in an objective set of criteria. For MRI safety in the USA at least, the document that gets identified as the MRI safety standard of care is the ACR manual on MRI safety. So yes, the plaintiffs and the defendants will each differ on their individual experts who will say, this is what I would have done, but the weight of any individual experts response will be amplified by how much it agrees with the documented standard.
Okay, enough with the mechanics. Let’s talk about the specifics of what happened to Keith McAllister at Nassau Open MRI and who we think has responsibility for the different parts of this event. Now, from most MRI accidents, you get very different accounts from the individuals involved. Something like the parable of the three blind men describing what an elephant is based on the part that they’re touching. It’s a hose, says the man touching the trunk. No, it’s a tree trunk, says the man touching the elephant’s leg. No, it’s a snake, says the man touching the elephant’s tail. Oftentimes, you actually have to piece together a bunch of different sort of individual perspectives or subjective stories before you feel like you’ve got something that’s approaching an objective account. For this accident, however, we have a video record of at least one critical part of what happened. And that slices through the subjectivity and the personal advantage spin that happens all the time in cases like this.
We’re going to start by making a bunch of references to the leaked one-minute security camera footage of the incident, which you’ll be able to find in the show notes for this episode on our website, invisibleforcepodcast.com, if you want to see what we’re referring to. I’m going to kick things off with the very first frame of the video, even before Mr. McAllister walks into the frame. As the video starts, we see Ms. Jones McAllister lying on the MRI table, fully pulled out from the MRI’s tube. We see the MRI technologist on the far side of the patient table appearing and disappearing from view as he moves around because the wall that separates the control room from the MRI scanner blocks a lot of the view into that scan room. But before we see anything happen, just in that first frame alone, we see what appears to be Ms. Jones McAllister’s rollator, or rolling walker, inside the scan room with a purse hanging off of it. A purse.
As we discussed in the previous episode, because the point at which an object goes flying into the MRI scanner, because that varies a lot, the general rule is we don’t bring anything magnetizable into the MRI scanner room at all, period, full stop. We know those rollators are made out of ferromagnetic material. Additionally, beyond the rollator and the risks of things going flying, we also see Ms. Jones McAllister purse hanging off of it. I’d say if my wife’s purse is any indication, there’s a pretty good chance that there were ferromagnetic objects at risk of going flying in Ms. Jones McAllister purse. The standard Siemens warning signage that is typically mounted on the door into the MRI scanner room specifically warns about things like this. But even if there weren’t projectile objects in her purse, hearing aids, cell phones, the magnetic stripe on the bank cards, they can all be damaged by the powerful magnetic fields of an MRI scanner. Don’t ask me how I know that last one about bank cards getting erased. Even if the tech was certain that everything that might go flying had been taken out of her purse, do you think she took her wallet out of her purse but brought her purse in anyway?
I think that anyone who has worked in MRI long enough has stories of techs or maybe even been that tech who says they know just how far they can bring the conventional wheelchair into the room. Those people help make sure that my photo library of wheelchairs stuck to MRI scanners is always being refreshed. To be clear, while some people have done it, and I bet there are more techs than just the one at Nassau Open MRI that continue to do it, this is explicitly prohibited by the MRI manufacturers’ safety guidance, their operators’ manuals, and the warning signs they put on the MRI scan room doors. Perhaps most importantly, relative to the MRI safety standard of care, bringing magnetic materials into the MRI scanner room is strictly prohibited, except under some very limited conditions. By that standard of care-defining document, the ACR manual on safety. As a practice, this is dumb, it’s dangerous, and apart from perhaps a few old farts who may say they’ve got away with it regularly, there aren’t any standard documents that can don this practice.
The next thing in the sequence of evidence we see on the video, we watch Mr. McAllister walk into frame and walk right through the doorway into the MRI scanner room with his glowing cell phone in his hand. We’ll start by asking where he came from, because only persons who are fully screened and prepared to go into the MRI scanner room should be permitted into the room just prior to the scanner room. We see his cell phone and very shortly in the video, we’ll wind up learning about the chain, neither of which should have been allowed into the control room before the MRI scanner room, much less the scanner room itself. Many MRI facilities use a plastic chain or a retractable strap or a warning sign like a railroad crossing arm across the doorway so that in a situation like this where the tech may not see who’s approaching the door to the MRI scanner room, the person coming towards that doorway, they have a physical warning barrier, both to slow them down from getting into the room and also to warn them about the risks. If Nassau Open MRI had any of these features, they weren’t being used on this day.
There are even warning or detection tools that are specifically designed to identify the types of materials that will get drawn into MRI scanners before they enter the scanner room. These are a special breed of metal detectors that only detect magnetic materials and ignore non-magnetic materials such as aluminum or titanium that are made to safely go into the MRI scan room. These are called ferromagnetic detectors and they’re available in both hand wand style versions and around the door entry control versions. These can be incredibly valuable in identifying projectile risks before the object makes it into the room with the giant superconducting electromagnet in the middle of it. There was no evidence that Nassau Open MRI had used any of these.
In his statements to me or to the conference attendees, the MRI tech from Nassau Open MRI talked about he couldn’t see the chain around the neck of Mr. McAllister. Even if we accept that it’s true, even though he surely saw the rollator and the purse and Mr. McAllister’s phone, the mere fact that Mr. McAllister was in an area that should have been secured and limited to only screened people, the fact that there were no MRI scanner room doorway entrance barriers, no ferromagnetic detection systems at the doorway, there’s a very long list of interventions or practices that are pretty standard in MRI facilities that could have either outright prevented this tragedy or at least given a lot of forewarning that something dangerous was about to happen.
When it comes to legal responsibility, at some level, all of this was happening under the name of Nassau Open MRI, so they likely have the most stake with respect to the lawsuit. Now, it’s true that we don’t know if the owners or management of the imaging center failed to provide a locked door to keep unscreened persons out or if the tech just left the door unlocked or let people through without effectively screening them. We don’t know if Nassau Open MRI didn’t have screening policies or if the tech just failed to follow those site policies. We don’t know if Nassau Open MRI allowed bringing things into the MRI scan room like the Rolator or Ms. Jones-McAllister’s purse or if the tech just failed to follow management’s policies. At some point, it doesn’t really even matter if the tech was violating site policies because Nassau Open MRI was responsible for not only having policies, but for also making sure these policies were being followed. The company was responsible for making sure that their MRI services were being delivered safely. And if, hypothetically, the MRI technologies had been slacking off and ignoring policy, it was the company’s duty to identify and correct that behavior or find someone else who would do it correctly.
It may seem odd to people outside of radiology, but the radiologist has an obligation not only to read the MRI studies, but they also have an obligation to the safety of the clinical service being offered. Now, unless the radiologist operates under the business name East Coast Radiology, one of the defendants in the initial complaint, they’re not individually named. In a prior lawsuit between the partners that make up GM Partners Westbury, the company formed to lease the whole building and then sublet a part of it to Nassau Open MRI, Dr. Eliesier Offenbacher is identified as quote, owing a duty of care under generally accepted MRI safety standards. This is suggesting to me at least that Dr. Offenbacher may have been the designated radiologist for Nassau Open MRI.
In the United States, MRIs are prescription exams, meaning that even if they’re not physically present, a licensed physician, typically the radiologist, is the prescribing physician and is supposed to be legally responsible for the safe execution of that study. If he is or was the radiologist, Dr. Offenbacher had a legal duty to make sure that MRI exams were being provided in a safe manner, aligned with the standard of care. In the conversation Toby had with the MRI tech at the ARMRIT meeting, one of the things the tech said was something to the effect of how clueless about MRI, MRI safety, the site’s radiologist was. The tech didn’t identify the radiologist by name, but Dr. Offenbacher appears to have some sort of integral role with Nassau Open MRI. If that’s true, and Dr. Offenbacher was reading their MRI studies, and if he was clueless about MRI safety and allowed unsafe practices to run rampant at a site that he was supposed to be overseeing, well, then it would appear that Dr. Offenbacher would have a hand in the creation of an environment that allowed this accident to happen.
A quick note here about the legal relationship between a radiologist and an MRI technologist. In the eyes of most courts, the MRI technologist is something like a puppet or a disembodied set of eyes, ears, and hands of the radiologist. Technologists legally aren’t supposed to be making care decisions. They’re supposed to be simply following the documented policies of their employer, the hospital or the imaging center, and the clinical care decisions of the supervising radiologist. To a large degree, MRI techs, as long as they’re acting within their scope, are not completely immune from judgments, but they do have serious legal protections. They can still be named in the lawsuits, but often this is a tactic. And not because the tech is meant to be the primary defendant.
In fact, if we go back to the litigation around the 2001 Colombini fatal MRI accident, in her deposition, one of the MRI technologists answered a question about who was responsible with something along the lines of, as the technologist, I’m responsible for everything that happens in the MRI suite. Very brave, very noble, but also legally very wrong. For this memory, I’d like to imagine that the judge in the Colombini case was from South Carolina because she issued an opinion that was essentially, ‘well, bless your heart.’ Which, if you don’t speak Southern means I’m not quite sure how you could be more wrong. The judge in that case said that the safe care of the patients was the responsibility of the hospital and the radiologist. Even if the tech felt like they had legal responsibility, the judge said that was not the case.
Earlier in this series, we made a rather big deal about the potential involvement or legal exposure of both Siemens, who made the MRI scanner, and Intermed, the biomedical servicing company that maintained the MRI scanner for Nassau Open MRI. This was all based on the early implications that the quench button failed when pushed, a story that seems to get less and less plausible as more details come out. If the current theory that the MRI technologist was pushing the wrong emergency button, if that’s correct, then there would be no direct path of liability or responsibility for either Siemens or Intermed. We’re seeing the fact that neither of these two companies are named as defendants in the initial complaint as some pretty strong circumstantial evidence that supports the pushing the wrong button explanation of how this happened.
So if lawsuits often, at least to start with, name everyone, what does it mean that they didn’t individually name the technologist as a defendant? That may come down to peculiarities of the New York State law. When we talked in a previous episode about the Michael Colombini lawsuit, I think we mentioned how the technologists were named individually. Oftentimes, a lawsuit naming a company allows for discovery from any of the company’s employees related to the claim. In the Colombini case, there was a separate business entity that ostensibly ran the MRI service, but the employee’s paychecks came from the hospital. In that case, because of the convoluted ownership structure, it may not have been clear which company the techs were employees of, so they may have been individually named as defendants as an insurance policy of sorts. It may well be in this case that there’s no such ambiguity, so no need to identify the MRI tech as a separate named defendant.
So from our assessment, it seems pretty clear that the MRI technologists messed up in a few different ways. We don’t know whether these faulty practices were institutional, that they always happened at Nassau Open MRI, just without catastrophic results before now, or if they were the result of a tech who just chose to kind of go rogue. In some ways, that probably doesn’t matter much, because it will likely be the company that will shoulder the legal liability for the violations of the standard of care, for themselves and for their employees. Additionally, there was a legal duty on the part of the Nassau Open MRI radiologist, who may well have been Dr. Offenbacher, to make sure that patient care being provided under his prescription was being delivered safely. The fact that we’ve had content for 10 episodes of the podcast about a fatal MRI accident is a good indication that care wasn’t being delivered safely. Now, after the break, we’ll also answer the question, should any of these parties be held criminally liable for the preventable death of Mr. Keith McAllister?
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Before the break, we were discussing civil suits, where a person is acting against another person, or multiple people or companies. And it’s worth noting that the defendants in the lawsuit brought by Mrs. Jones-McAllister have already started filing their documents with the court, each stating along the lines of nothing bad really happened, or if something bad did happen, surely it was somebody else’s fault. And it’s likely to take years for that particular piece of the puzzle to get sorted. Here in the second half of today’s show, we’re going to be describing the state acting against individuals or groups or companies. Criminal law. If a lawsuit or civil action is successful, the plaintiff may get a financial settlement or they may compel the defendant to take some specific action. But if it’s a criminal case, if that’s successful, it could potentially result in penalty sanctions or even, in the most extreme, jail time for one or more of the defendants.
Unlike civil suits, which revolve mostly around one, were there harms, and two, should they have been prevented, criminal cases, at least in the state of New York, are also contingent on the mental state of the person who was accused, at least in the selection of charges. New York essentially has three different tiers of severity for criminal charging and prosecution. There’s negligence, which means I didn’t realize what I was doing was wrong. There’s recklessness, which means I realized what I was doing was wrong, but I didn’t care. And then there’s intent. I did exactly what I wanted. I knew what was wrong and I did it anyway because I wanted the outcome. So per New York state law, if you intend to kill someone, that’s murder. If you were reckless and that reckless behavior resulted in someone’s death, that would be manslaughter. If you were negligent and that resulted in someone’s death, that would be criminally negligent homicide.
Now, because of this dependency on the state of mind, district attorneys are kind of asked to peer into the souls of people who are being considered for charging for a crime. And they’re supposed to ascertain if they can not only prove what happened, but also the charged person’s state of mind around the actions and the outcome. Part of criminal charging is contingent on the duty that the person owed in the situation. This is true for civil litigation as well. Before the break, we talked about three duty-owing parties. We talked about Nassau Open MRI, the company. We talked about the MRI tech, the person. And we talked about the supervising physician or the radiologist. Let’s be explicit about what duties we think each party owed.
We’ll start with Nassau Open MRI. Both of us believe they had a duty to have a safe physical environment for workers, patients, and if they let them in to what should have been a secure access area, visitors as well. We also believe they had a duty to have appropriately trained personnel to manage risks, including those that are specific to MRI, at least to the level of the standard of care. We also believe that they had a duty to have clearly articulated operational policies, and those policies should follow the standard of care. While we think the failing of the first two are pretty much self-evident, we actually don’t know about the third. We currently don’t know if Nassau Open MRI had any policies at all, if the policies were appropriate and weren’t followed, or if they were appropriate and somewhat followed. We have no information on their policies whatsoever.
The second party who owed some sort of duty of creating safe environment is the MRI tech. Now, John and I both believe that the tech had a duty to operate that scanner safely, not just operate it, but control the environment. While we think that nothing indicates that the tech messed up Mrs. John’s McAllister’s scan itself, we think that that duty extends to understanding the emergency functions of an MRI scanner. We also believe that the tech had a duty to follow site policy and or radiologist direction. This dovetails with what we don’t yet know about the existence of MRI safety policy that John just mentioned. Lastly, for the tech, we think that they had a duty to execute emergency procedures. Now, I don’t think either John or I begrudges someone from freezing up for a few seconds in an emergency situation, or kind of requiring a moment to process before they jump into whatever it is they need to do. But ultimately, there is a duty to get the job done, and that didn’t happen here.
Lastly, the radiologist. Both of us believe that the radiologist had a duty to have clearly articulated clinical policies that followed the clinical standard of care. We don’t know if they existed or not, but given some of the text complaints about the radiologists, we’re not optimistic. Add to that, we believe that the radiologist had a duty to make sure care was being delivered safely and effectively. Again, the simple facts of the incident suggest this duty wasn’t met.
With respect to criminal charges that might be contemplated, as critical as John and I are about what happened, there is zero evidence of an intent to harm on the part of the imaging center, the MRI tech, or the radiologist. In fact, the act of trying to get Mr. McAllister out from the bore and calling 911 and calling Intermed, all of these behaviors go directly against any idea that there was an intent to harm. From a criminal charging perspective, if we were the Nassau County DA, no, we wouldn’t even contemplate murder charges.
Now, recklessness, if you’ll remember, is knowing about a risk and not caring. We weren’t in the heads of any of the defendants in this case, so we can’t know what they knew. But what we can know is that there is ample information about safe practices for MRI that existed for free online. There are articles, webinars, academic papers, CE programs, and at the time of the accident, at least six different MRI safety practice publications from the American College of Radiology. While we may not know for certain what they knew, we can know for certain that the information on how to practice MRI safely was readily available. This is, in our opinion, suggestive of recklessness, which criminally could be manslaughter.
The last state of mind category is negligence. This is exemplified by being oblivious to the presence of risk to someone. The tech purportedly said that he instructed Mr. McAllister to remove the chain, but clearly the tech neglected to see if it was, in fact, off before allowing Mr. McAllister to come into the MRI room to help his wife up off the table. Someone, perhaps Nassau Open MRI, perhaps the MRI tech neglected to keep unscreened people out of the MRI area. And if the information about the tech misunderstanding where the quench button, if that information is correct, then someone was negligent in making sure that the MRI tech was appropriately trained to be responsible for the administration of patient care in this facility.
So if we were the Nassau County DA, we have a very similar reaction to the idea of charging each Nassau Open MRI, the company, the MRI technologist, and the radiologist who was supposed to oversee the safety of MRI services. Did any of them demonstrate an intent to harm Mr. McAllister? No. Were any of them reckless in allowing the conditions that led to Mr. McAllister’s death? That’s a question I think we will need more information to be able to answer. There’s certainly enough there to make a question worth exploring this a little further. Were the company, the tech, or the radiologist negligent in allowing harm? It seems there’s a lot of information about how to safely operate an MRI scanner. As a provider, as a technologist, as a supervising radiologist, they either let slide or intentionally decided not to follow. Does that equal negligence? We don’t know, but at least for us, it’s certainly leaning that way.
Our pretend DA evaluation suggests potential consideration of criminally negligent homicide and potentially, perhaps even manslaughter charges. So if John and I as amateur DAs come to that, why did the Nassau DA not file criminal charges? They may have been thrown a little bit by the highly unusual situation. They may be unfamiliar with the duties owed by the various parties in MRI care. Or they may have even believed that there was a strong case for negligence, that they thought maybe the difficulty in trying this case may exceed any value that they see in prosecuting it. They undoubtedly have access to more information than we do, and some of that information may have shaped their decisions to not charge anyone. Or they may have simply felt that a conviction would be an uphill battle and they made a tactical decision not to pursue charges based on what they perceived as being a low probability of prosecution success.
It’s worth taking just a minute to talk a bit further about radiologists specifically and their potential responsibility for MRI safety. There’s a widespread notion among radiologists that either physical distance or time separation between when the exam is performed and when they later get the images to read legally insulates them from responsibility or liability for an MRI accident. I mean, of course, we can’t hold someone who wasn’t there during an MRI scan legally responsible for something that went wrong, can we? Radiologists generally understand their obligations for timely and accurate readings of MRI studies. But actually, supervising MRI scans? Every year, there are fewer and fewer radiologists actually in the building where the MRI studies are being performed, and more and more reading from remote locations. This physical separation makes the direct supervision essentially impossible. So radiologists are off the hook, right?
The idea of not being close to where an MRI is being done, that that somehow protects the radiologist from legal responsibility? Yeah, that’s generally not supported by the law. For one thing, there really isn’t a patient care reason why the radiologists don’t work the locations where the MRIs are being performed. There are financial and convenience and workflow reasons. To a large extent, radiologists have chosen not to be close to direct patient care. The law hasn’t really carved out an exception for radiologists and considers their obligation to safe care in a manner similar to that of a surgeon who is obviously hands on with their patient. While conviction by a jury may be difficult because of remoteness arguments that the defense attorneys bring up, and this will come into play in either or both consideration of criminal or civil charges that would name the radiologist in Nassau’s open MRI safety practices. Radiologists should be generally aware that being an absentee physician isn’t really the legal protection that many of them believe it to be.
As we are bringing this episode to a close, it’s worth repeating where we understand both the civil case and criminal case are ongoing. Even though this incident occurred almost a year ago, the lawsuit, the civil case, was filed just a few weeks ago. For reference, the civil suit for the Michael Colombini case took about eight years to come to a settlement. So we’re probably just turning from page one to page two in a war and peace sized book in terms of how close we are to a resolution. And the Nassau County DA’s office has given zero indication that they’re thinking about filing criminal charges. And while we couched our presentation of our interpretations as if we were expert witnesses, most likely for the plaintiff, Ms. Jones-McAllister, we’re absolutely not engaged by any of the parties in this lawsuit as expert witnesses, as consultants or as advisors. But if you’re an attorney and you have a different case you want to hit us up, we’re available.
It seems weird to be 10 episodes into the podcast, and something as important as the civil suit is only just now kicking off. Even though this series on Nassau Open MRI fatal MRI incident is going to be wrapping up in another couple of episodes long before we expect the civil case to resolve, we feel like we’re reaching a point where we now actually have a good handle on what did and what didn’t happen.
“He waved goodbye to me, and his whole body went limp.”
“I’m just surprised that they didn’t happen. That really made me upset because that should never happen.”
“I think that they should have had better precautions, like how that even happened, how do you even get to that point.”
Next episode, we’re going to change our focus from the events around this incident to you, our listener, and what’s within your power to help identify MRI providers for yourself, your family, your loved ones, in order to help assure safety. The episode after that one, that’s going to be our final episode in this series, at least for now. And that will be a recap of what the state of New York is, or isn’t, doing to help prevent accidents like this in the future.
And if you were starting to feel down that this series is coming to a close in just a few more episodes, turn that frown upside down, my friend, because we are planning a special three-part series on the Colombini accident to coincide with MRI Safety Week 2026. We have plans for another long series after the Colombini one.
The next one will be about the high-profile MRI accident that happened in California in 2023, where a nurse got pinned against an MRI scanner by an ICU bed. So make sure that you’ve subscribed to the Invisible Force podcast to get the next episode, and the episodes from each of our upcoming series as soon as they drop.
For this week’s show, our sources were the leaked security camera footage of the accident, several different lawsuit-associated documents, as well as conversations with the Nassau County Police and the Nassau County District Attorney, some digging into New York State criminal law, as well as a number of confidential sources.
Our introductory radio play was an assembly of comments made by the public in and around the time of the accident.
If you have any information about this MRI accident or any MRI accidents, please reach out to us through our website, invisibleforcepodcast.com. Episodes, show notes, and a tip line contact page are always available there. Also, you can leave us a voicemail with information about this incident or any at area code 631-MRI-TIPS, the number again, 631-MRI-TIPS or 631-674-8477.
We’d also like you to like and share our podcast with your friends, your colleagues, and coworkers. 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.
