This episode focuses-in on the accounts of the actions of Mr. Keith McAllister, as well as the actions of family in the immediate aftermath of the fatal MRI accident that took Mr. McAllister’s life. This includes the family hiring two law firms, and the results of the Nassau County Police Department’s homicide investigation, and its referral to the District Attorney’s office.
As this deadly MRI accident, described in media as a ‘freak accident,’ was slipping out of news coverage, the McAllister family was getting their legal team in place for the impending lawsuit against Nassau Open MRI. They started with Smith Lauterborn and Cheung, and then added the famous civil rights firm of Ben Crump to their legal team for the MRI death of Keith McAllister.
Even with all the lawyers, there was still no lawsuit over the fatal MRI accident… at least not yet. And the Nassau County DA’s Office was being very tight-lipped about whether they were contemplating criminal charges in relation to this MRI death.
Show Notes:
Leaked Security Camera Footage
McAllister Family GoFundMe Page
Articles 1 and 2 on McAllister Family Retaining Attorney Michael Lauterborn
Articles 1 and 2 on McAllister Family Retaining Attorney Ben Crump
Transcript:
“…And that’s why details like this are so important to the healthcare profession. We’re just wanting to identify what went wrong so that we can share this with other MRI providers and help make sure that similar accidents don’t occur in the future.”
“Oh, in a way, that’s what we do whenever our firm represents accident victims. We want the information out to protect people.”
“So you’d be willing to share the information outside of the proceedings?”
“I don’t think that would 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 in online news stories as freak accidents.
Our entire first season is dedicated to an accident you heard about in the news and in previous episodes here on this podcast about a man who died in an MRI accident out on Long Island, New York, just a few months ago in July of 2025. In this accident, Mr. Keith McAllister died after he got pulled into an MRI scanner by a 20-pound chain around his neck at Nassau Open MRI.
This is a good time to reintroduce you to the co-hosts for our little podcast.
I’m John Posh, MRI technologist, educator, and long-time 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 and safety consultant, and co-author of the recent The Technologist’s MRI Safety Handbook.
Now, if you’ve listened to our previous episodes, because, of course, you did, you’ve heard us list out the various groups from the feds to accreditation organizations, to the state of New York, to local officials, and these groups who we might have thought had duties to make sure that this accident never happened. And how each of them kind of wound up having a get-out-of-responsibility-free card? This apparently means that nobody outside Nassau Open MRI themselves had any direct responsibility for protecting the public from unsafe practices around the MRI. For this episode, our imaginary camera is going to refocus specifically on Mrs. Jones McAllister and the McAllister family in the immediate aftermath of the accident. Because we’ve so far been unable to get the public record information from Nassau County, a good bit of the information we’ve assembled has been from statements made either directly by Mrs. Jones McAllister or her family. In the days immediately following her husband’s death, an interview with Mrs. Jones McAllister made the rounds. It was being used in TV news coverage across the country and literally around the world. It’s worth taking just a few minutes to point out some of the conflicts between what she said in the interview, what we saw in the leaked security camera video, as well as what Nassau County Police Department blotter described the incident. The first area of disagreement is about whether or not Mr. McAllister was unauthorized as described in the police description, and that description was picked up widely in the media.
“The victims say police was sucked into an MRI machine when he entered a scanning room without authority. He heard his relative screaming and was concerned, a witness told police, when the man allegedly defied orders to stay out. He was wearing a metallic necklace.”
“Now Nassau County Police say a man walked in to assist the patient getting out of the MRI against the discretion of the tech.”
“Nassau County Police say a 61-year-old man was magnetically pulled into an MRI Wednesday while wearing a large metal chain. He apparently walked into an unauthorized area at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury while a scan was underway, and he was drawn into the machine.”
The news stations all ran with the unauthorized label, some seemingly suggesting that Keith McAllister forced his way into the area where he should not have been. We want to make it perfectly clear that as an unscreened person, he should not have been inside the MRI scanner room or even in the control room area. But, as to the question of whether or not Nassau Open MRI had authorized him to be in that area, from the leaked security camera video, we know that Mr. McAllister walks into the MRI scan room, and there doesn’t appear to be any obvious concern on the part of the tech about him being in that room.
You and I watched that security camera, and even before Mr. McAllister walks into the room, I think we both saw that rolling walker that was parked inside the room, sort of at the foot of the MRI table. Which, incidentally, appears to be the same rolling walker that Mrs. Jones McAllister is sitting in that TV interview shortly after her husband’s death. Now, that rolling walker, that shouldn’t have been let inside the room. And then, as the security camera video starts, we see Mr. McAllister walking into the room with his cell phone in his hand. That also shouldn’t have been let inside the room. For this part of the video, the MRI technologist is kind of in and out of view on the opposite side of the MRI patient table from where Mr. McAllister is walking. But the tech doesn’t show any signs of concern about Mr. McAllister being there. Or the rolling walker. Or Mr. McAllister’s cell phone. All of which are plainly visible in the security camera video. Even if the MRI tech was completely unaware of the chain around Mr. McAllister’s neck. More on this in just a second. Walking into the room with your cell phone in your hand should, at the very minimum, deserve some yelling and enthusiastic hand gestures to get the person with the phone to immediately exit the MRI scanner room. The video doesn’t show anything like that happening. It seems pretty clear to us that describing his presence as quote unquote unauthorized is some after the fact attempt at spinning a narrative to minimize what appear to be some pretty awful process errors on the part of Nassau Open MRI.
Yeah, I think if we showed that video to a hundred technologists and said what would the reaction expected, what would the expected reaction be when you see someone walking in the room like that, we would see someone waving their arms, yelling frantically, scrambling across the room to block that person from getting in the room. I think that there’s no question that the video definitely doesn’t show that.
Yeah. A second area of disagreement among the different accounts is the detail that the MRI tech brought Mr. McAllister into the room.
“Adrian said after she’d had an MRI on her knee Wednesday, she needed help getting up. She said she asked the technician to get her husband.”
“I yelled out Keith’s name, ‘Keith, Keith, come help me up, come help me up’.”
“She said the technician went to get her husband and brought him into the room. Despite the fact that Keith was wearing a 20 pound chain around his neck with a large lock that he used for weight training.”
The statement from Mrs. Jones McAllister’s News 12 Interviews says that the tech went to get Mr. McAllister to come into the room. Now, some version of this appears to be repeated by Mrs. Jones McAllister’s daughter, who described the circumstances in her stepfather’s death in a GoFundMe appeal for the funeral expenses. And that GoFundMe page says, quote, several news stations are saying he wasn’t authorized to be in the room when in fact he was because the technician went and brought him into the room. While my mother was lying on the table, the technician left the room to get her husband to help her up off of the table. Both of those are quotes from the family’s GoFundMe page.
The leaked security camera video doesn’t show the technologist going out of the room and getting Mr. McAllister. In fact, for the minute long piece of video that was leaked, we never see the MRI tech come out of the scan room at all. Now the security video that’s circulating just starts as Mr. McAllister is walking into the scan room, so we don’t know what happened prior to the start of that video clip. The video also doesn’t contain an audio track, so if either Ms. Jones McAllister or the MRI technologist called out to Keith McAllister, we’re unable to verify that. But from the video that is available, there’s zero indication that the MRI technologist had anything to do with inviting Mr. McAllister into the MRI scan room to help get his wife off the table.
In addition to the discrepancies, there was at least one key statement from that interview that we will wind up corroborating in a later episode. In her TV interview, Mrs. Jones McAllister said, we’d been there before and that tech had seen that chain before.
Adrienne said that this was not the first time she and Keith had been to Nassau Open MRI and she said he’d worn the big chain here before.
It’s not the first time that guy has seen that chain. They had a conversation about it before. Oh, that’s a big chain.
Later we’ll learn some information that verifies this that, yes, the MRI technologist was familiar with Keith McAllister and the fact that he wore a chain for weight training. More than that, we’ll get corroboration from a very surprising source that the MRI tech was even aware of the chain around Mr. McAllister’s neck on the day of the accident. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Those details are for an upcoming episode.
We wanted to do this little recap and fact comparison because we think it’s important to make clear that it appears that both Nassau Open MRI’s account of things, which got memorialized by Nassau County Police and then repeated by a bunch of newscasts, as well as the accounts from the Jones-McAllister family, well, they all appear to have spun elements of the story in ways they probably thought were beneficial to them. We also wanted to bring in a section of the news reporting to illustrate how nature abhors a vacuum and in the rush to get breaking news stories on the air sometimes rely on perspectives of just one party or another, whatever information is close at hand.
So far, our reconstructed timeline is based on information from the few public sources, but more so from listeners like you who have given us tips. As we described for you in our last episode, we’ve been trying to get the official reports from Nassau County, but the state of New York’s Freedom of Information Law allows jurisdictions to withhold information like 911 calls or body camera footage and the police reports if you don’t have permission of a quote unquote involved person. I mean, as much as we want to get this information, we understand the reasoning behind such restrictions when information like this could potentially be used to further traumatize a victim of a crime, even though that’s pretty much the opposite of what we’re wanting to do. In order to try and get the right person as our involved person, we asked Nassau County PD who, under the law, qualifies as an involved person. Could it be one of the first responders, a police or a paramedic, someone who worked at the facility, or would it have to be Mrs. Jones McAllister or the MRI technologist? So far, unfortunately, we haven’t gotten a response to that question from the Nassau County Police Department.
While we’re still hoping to get the official police reports with the hard chronology, you know from episodes 3 and 4 that after Keith McAllister got pulled in, and the MRI technologist and Mrs. Jones McAllister were unsuccessful in pulling Keith out, that someone, we’ll later learn it was the MRI technologist, tried to quench the MRI scanner, but the quench didn’t work. We know someone at Nassau Open MRI called 911, but the first responders on scene were also not able to get Keith out of the MRI scanner because of the magnetized heavy-duty chain around his neck. We know that someone from Nassau Open MRI called their MRI servicing company, Intermed, who emergently dispatched a service tech who was at a different facility in Long Island at the time and was able to get there rather quickly. We also know that someone eventually got the MRI to quench and that they were able to get Mr. McAllister out of the magnet and rush him to the hospital.
Now, just in listing these things, that sounds like they could have all happened within a 10-minute window, but one piece of the chronology that we have been able to put together suggests that this was much longer. And that comes from the McAllister’s GoFundMe page for the funeral expenses. And it read, quote, he was attached to the machine for almost an hour before they could release the chain from the machine. That’s a direct quote. For the first day or two, after Mr. McAllister’s death, there was news coming from the family through TV interviews, and then something happened, and Mrs. McAllister and the family quickly went radio silent.
The season one sponsor of the Invisible Force podcast is cairereporting.org. That’s CAIRE spelled C-A-I-R-E. carereporting.org is a confidential MRI adverse incident reporting system available to all of us in the public, as well as offering an enterprise solution to hospitals or imaging centers for secure confidential reporting of MRI incidents, accidents and near misses. If you have direct knowledge of an MRI accident that may have been swept under the rug, or if you want information about how CAIRE could be set up as a private internal error reporting tool for your hospital or imaging center, carereporting.org can help you with both of those. CAIRE has an assembled panel of international experts in MRI safety and accidents. Reports submitted through either the public website or through the enterprise system get reviewed by their experts who then deliver insights into the contributing causes of how accidents and near miss events occur, and more importantly, steps that could prevent similar accidents in the future. For more information, please visit cairereporting.org. That’s CAIRE spelled C-A-I-R-E.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, there are two primary branches of law and legal action that follow the death of Mr. McAllister, or really anyone in this situation. There’s criminal law, like law and order, where police investigate events that might be crimes, and the district attorneys make determinations about whether or not to prosecute those. And then there’s civil law, which is where people sue each other in order to compel some specific action, such as take down your side fence that you built on my side of the property line, or get compensated for damages, etc. As you might expect from an accident in which someone died, Mr. McAllister’s death is going through both branches.
First we’ll consider the potential criminal law proceedings that might have pointed towards Nassau Open MRI or its staff. While Nassau County Police Department investigated this incident with their homicide team, that doesn’t automatically mean that there would be criminal charges. While, yes, homicide investigations can and do sometimes get recommended to the district attorney for criminal charging and prosecution, simply being investigated by the homicide squad doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where it’s headed. We imagine that while it was being investigated by the police, they were contemplating whether criminal negligence or maybe even manslaughter charges might be appropriate. We were told that the homicide investigator passed the information up to the DA’s office and that, at least so far, the DA’s office has declined to file any criminal charges against either the imaging center or the MRI technologist. For the moment, at least, the question of, will there be any criminal charges, that appears to be answered and that answer, at least for now, is no.
So next, we’ll consider civil proceedings that seem almost inevitable in a case like this. Just a few days after Mr. McAllister died in the hospital, the New York Post article stated, Michael Lauterborn, an attorney for McAllister’s widow Adrian Jones McAllister, said the family is now seeking accountability for the freak accident. Before the break, we remarked on how the family went silent after the TV news interview. We suspect that it was the hiring of Mr. Lauterborn and the attorney’s advice to refrain from making any more public statements that was the cause of the sudden onset silence.
I actually reached out to Michael Lauterborn, the attorney from the firm Smith Chung in Lauterborn, and I spoke with him a couple of times after he was identified as representing Mrs. Jones McAllister. I told him about my background and that I was looking into the accident trying to identify the root causes to help inform the radiology profession in order to help prevent similar accidents in the future. I explained that my interest was strictly in identifying the contributing factors to be able to help identify effective safeguards and preventions. Mr. Lauterborn said something to the effect of, that’s what we try and do on behalf of our clients, and this had me for a short while at least. Hopeful that he and his firm would be interested in collaborating with us on this. Then he asked me if I would serve as an expert witness on the case on behalf of the McAllisters. Segue time. We should probably say something about what it is to be an expert witness and how if either of us were experts on this case, we probably wouldn’t be making this podcast.
So, a legal expert witness is a fairly common thing in the lawsuit, especially ones that depend on technical details like how MRIs work or how to turn them off in an emergency. Attorneys are experts at the law, and unless they do a whole bunch of cases for vehicle malfunctions or petroleum refinery accidents or MRI injury cases, the attorneys probably need some help from a subject matter expert to help them understand exactly what happened, what the professional standard of care is in that situation, and whether or not any of the parties should have acted differently than they did. The expert witness can be a subject matter expert angel on the shoulder of the attorney, giving them technical guidance as to what questions to ask, what areas to explore further, and pointing them to the industry-specific standards or practices to reference. Yes, the expert witness may write expert opinion documents that get filed with the courts. They might also testify in depositions or at trial, but I think their most important role is the subject matter expert coach for the attorneys. Having said that, one of the consequences of agreeing to be an expert witness is that you’re almost always functionally gagged from discussing any of the details about what you’re learning with any parties outside of the attorneys who have retained you. So, if you had taken them up on the offer to be an expert witness in this case, that would have shut you out of this as an independent investigator, right?
Well, I asked him exactly that. I told him that if he was serious about his mission of getting information out to inform other MRI providers about things that other folks could do to reduce their risk of similar accidents, well, if he was serious about that, then he should have no problem allowing me to do this investigation, what ultimately turned into this podcast that you’re listening to right now. So I asked, would you have a problem with me doing that while serving as your expert witness? He was quiet for a long time, and then eventually said, I don’t think that would work.
You knew you were asking him for a degree of latitude that attorneys don’t ever give expert witnesses, right?
Yeah. I knew and I had zero expectation that he was going to agree to my proposal. I just wanted to give him a chance to live up to what he said was one of his missions, and it turned out that that was more of a sales pitch.
Interesting. So just so you know, both Toby and I have done a fair bit of MRI expert witness work. I have to say, if you’re interested in really understanding what happens in an accident or injury, being an expert witness does get you a behind-the-curtain view, allowing you to see information that would otherwise be hidden, either because the involved parties say it’s confidential or because it contains sensitive information that really needs a court order to compel its release. While neither Toby or I have a vacation home in the Bahamas or a boat, because of our expert witness work, the pay for being an expert witness work is significant. So saying no to both the access to the information and the expert witness fees in this case is important.
For better or for worse, yeah. I know you feel the same way, John, but I thought that Keith McAllister story was just too big to keep all boxed up for months or more likely years that it would take for this to go through the litigation process. In a prior episode, we talked about a fatal MRI accident that took place in 2001, also in New York, the death of Michael Colombini. Now, I wasn’t an expert witness for that case, although you were, right John? Now, while I wasn’t formally involved in that case, I did a lot of investigating and reporting based on the court documents that were filed for that lawsuit. Court documents like depositions and affidavits. Now, that accident occurred in 2001, but the case wasn’t settled until 2009. By the time the case was resolved eight years later, the Colombini accident was news really only to people like John and me, people who cared deeply about MRI safety. I wasn’t willing to let that happen again. I wasn’t prepared to wait eight years to be able to tell the story of Keith McAllister.
Yeah, it probably would have taken years to get this legal resolution to the courts. And yeah, that would really be too long to wait for any details of this story. So when you said thanks, but no thanks to the expert witness invitation, was that the last time you talked with him?
Not the last time. We agreed to keep talking informally. Although that too faded when it became clear that he saw information sharing as a one way street with me, with me sharing the information and him saying that everything he knew was confidential. My last interaction with the firm, Mr. Lauterborn had already pawned me off to associates at this point, and he wasn’t talking to me directly. The last interaction was a response to an appeal to his assertion that he was interested in transparency. You remember from our last episode that Nassau County had denied our freedom of information law request, because there’s a provision that emergency response information requires a release from an involved person for the county to provide copies of that information, and from before the break, that we’re still waiting just to learn who exactly constitutes an involved person. I figured that if anybody, Mrs. Jones McAllister had to be regarded as an involved person. So, I had left a message for Mr. Lauterborn, asking if she would be willing to provide us with the notarized release. Mr. Lauterborn, really the associate that he had pushed my call to, said that the firm would not be sharing any further information with me, essentially, go away kid, you’re bothering me and I haven’t spoken with them since.
Less than two weeks after the announcement about retaining the firm of Smith, Chung and Lauterborn, new announcements were released about the family also retaining famous civil rights attorney Ben Crump to represent the family. Now, I don’t think either of us immediately recognized the name Ben Crump, but there’s no chance of not recognizing the names of some of the people or estates that he’s represented in the past. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. By this point, Toby was already starting to hit a brick wall with Michael Lauterborn, and we thought that part of the reason might be that Ben Crump’s office might now be in the driver’s seat. So we reached out. Perhaps it’s a function of being such a high-profile firm, but it appears that if you don’t have someone’s direct dial extension at Mr. Crump’s firm, you’re left either filling out an online form through their website or leaving a voicemail with the hopes that someone might call you back. We did both of those, but after a handful of unreturned messages, we realized that this too was probably a losing proposition. Eventually, someone from the Crump firm did call us back, but only to say that they weren’t interested in talking with us. Whether Ben Crump’s firm was the lead counsel or not, it was clear that they weren’t going to be helpful to any of the efforts to shine a light on Mr. McAllister’s death, at least not anytime soon.
It also appears that the instinct to not get wrapped up in expert witness role may have been a particularly good one. This accident happened in July of 2025, but a little more than a half year later, in March of 2026, there’s no indication that a lawsuit has ever been filed, either in New York state courts or in federal courts. Now, the New York courts have a publicly accessible online database. You can use it to search plaintiffs and defendants and attorneys and cases in all of the New York state courts. And so far, there are no matching cases. Federal cases aren’t as easy to look up, but a friend of the podcast looked into the federal PACER database, which is like the New York state database, but for federal cases. They looked in that for us, and just like the searches for the New York case, there’s nothing to suggest that a suit has been filed in federal court either. Now, plaintiffs often have years to file a civil suit, so just because there hasn’t been a suit filed yet, doesn’t mean that there won’t be one filed tomorrow.
Now, while our first communications with attorneys involved in this incident started with Ms. Jones McAllister’s legal team, it certainly didn’t end there. In our next episode, we’ll look at some of the other characters in this story and meet their attorneys too. We’ll also try and answer the questions of why we think all these months later lawsuits have not been filed. Has Ms. Jones McAllister decided to simply live and let live, or is there something strategic in the decision to delay filing a lawsuit?
“And that’s why details like this are so important to the health care profession. We’re just wanting to identify what went wrong so that we can share this with other MRI providers and help make sure that similar accidents don’t occur in the future. “
“Oh, in a way, that’s what we do whenever our firm represents accident victims. We want the information out to protect people.”
“So you’d be willing to share the information outside of the proceedings?”
“Um, I don’t think that would work.”
In the next episode, we’re going to dig into the reactions from Intermed, the contracted service company and their attorneys. And we’ll share with you a bit of a surprise when the attorneys for Siemens, the original manufacturers of the MRI scanner, reached out to us. We’ll also try and answer the question of why if everyone and their brother has lawyered up, why aren’t there lawsuits filed stemming from Keith McAllister’s death? Make sure that you’ve subscribed to the Invisible Force podcast to get the next episode as soon as it drops.
For this week’s show, our sources were, as always, the leaked security camera footage of the accident, multiple news accounts of the accident, as well as our individual conversations with Detective Cabe of the Nassau County Police Department’s Homicide Squad. The New York Post, Michael Lauterborn and other staff from Smith, Lauterborn and Cheung are interactions with representatives of the Ben Crump firm, as well as some confidential sources.
The introductory audio play this episode was voiced both by me, Toby Gilk, and Steve Blackler.
Now, if you have information about this incident, or really any other MRI accidents or incidents, please reach out to us either through the website, invisibleforcepodcast.com, or you can call our tips line, which is 631-MRI-TIPS. That number again is 631-MRI-TIPS or 631-674-8477. If you go to the website, Invisible Force Podcast, not only will you find the episodes there, but you’ll also find show notes and a tip line contact page.
We’d also like to ask you to like and share our podcast with your friends, and colleagues, and coworkers. Together, with your help, we will help unravel the mystery of exactly what happened, and with a little bit of luck, we’ll help make sure that accidents like this don’t ever occur again.
