In October of 2025, Nassau Open MRI out on Long Island, NY, formally closed up shop. Earlier they had deactivated their website, now they were officially closing their doors. They also weren’t talking to us. We had pretty much given up hope of getting anything from them until a remarkable employee of theirs interrupted one of Toby’s talks to ‘out’ themselves!
Here we learn about the 2025 ARMRIT meeting in which the MRI technologist from Nassau Open MRI stood up in the middle of a crowd and ‘doxxed’ himself to a few hundred colleagues. But not only did he stand up in the room, but he also had a long sit-down conversation about the fatal MRI accident, MRI safety practices, and the quench button that purportedly malfunctioned.
It was from this sit-down conversation that many new revelations about this fatal MRI accident emerged. Maybe the Nassau Open MRI radiologist didn’t know MRI safety? Maybe the tech pushed a button that wasn’t the quench button? Maybe much of what we thought we knew about this deadly MRI accident was just spin, and the facts were different…
Show Notes:
Video from conference of the MRI tech interrupting Toby, courtesy of Magnetic Minds Academy
Court filing indicating that (2015) Dr. Rigney was sole owner of Redtree Radiology, which owned the MRI scanner at Nassau Open MRI
Court filing indicating that (2025) Jason & Brian Goldberg were owners of Nassau Open MRI
Notice from Nassau Open MRI attorneys announcing the shut down of company operations and the unavailability of the scanner to inspection
Nassau Open MRI 2025 lawsuit against New Dorp for failing to maintain the MRI scanner
Epilogue: Civil Suit Filed – Adrienne Jones-McAllister vs. Nassau Open MRI
Transcript:
“Good morning, everyone, welcome to the conference. My name is Tobias Gilk. I’d like to thank you for joining me so early on the first day. I’m about to play for you a video that shows the horrific MRI accident that occurred just a few months ago in New York. Now, while the video isn’t graphic, there’s not blood and gore, I will say that it’s impactful, and it’s something that you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. Now, if you’d rather not watch, I completely understand…”
“Just so you know, that video you’re about to show, that’s me.”
“Could you repeat that?”
“I am the tech in that video you’re about to play.”
[crowd gasps]
Hello, and welcome back to the Invisible Force Podcast. This entire podcast series is built around exploring MRI incidents and accidents that often get described incorrectly in local news as freak accidents.
Our entire first season is dedicated to an accident you’ve already heard 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 McAlister died after he got pulled into the 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 prior episodes, this is a great time to reintroduce you to the co-hosts for the podcast.
I’m John Posh, an MRI technologist, MRI educator and longtime advocate for 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. I run an MRI safety seminar. You can learn more about at mrisafetycourse.com. And I’m the co-author of a new MRI safety textbook, the Technologist’s MRI Safety Handbook.
In previous episodes, you’ve heard us talk about the wild west regulatory environment in New York, where pretty much everything goes, at least with respect to MRI, and how there aren’t any minimum MRI safety standards for either hospitals or outpatient providers in order to protect patients and caregivers. You learned about the legal machinations of the McAllister family, their two different law firms, and how they were opposing the release of the emergency response documents from Nassau County. In the last episode, we discussed both Siemens, the company that originally made the MRI scanner that Nassau Open MRI bought from a used equipment vendor, and Intermed, the medical equipment service company who had been retained to help keep it running. We discussed the roles that each of those two companies might have played in the fact that the quench button, the MRI’s magnetic kill switch, reportedly didn’t work when it was initially pushed when Mr. McAllister was first trapped. In our last several episodes in which we focused on the key players, you know who we haven’t talked about yet? We haven’t talked about Nassau Open MRI. This episode is all about them.
So from the beginning, there was some real confusion about who they were. Nassau Open MRI is named after Nassau County on Long Island, New York, just a short drive if the traffic gods cooperate from downtown New York City. But that’s not the only Nassau County in the United States, and not the only Nassau County with an Open MRI provider that has named themselves after the county they’re located in. Just north of Jacksonville, Florida is another Nassau County, and this other Nassau County also has an Open MRI provider named Nassau Open MRI. For me, it’s like being in a big conference room and someone shouts, hey, John, and there are always a handful of heads that turn to see which John they’re actually talking to.
Initially, the fact that there were two seemingly unrelated MRI providers with the same name caused a boatload of confusion. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the Florida provider uses the web address of nassauopenmri.com and the New York provider uses a web address of nassaumri.com. We mentioned before about how the Long Island Nassau Open MRI had suspended their entire online presence, including taking down their website, but it appears that they’ve only recently put their website back up online. Last July, in the weeks after the accident when people were feverishly looking up who this was, and everyone’s Google search took them to the Florida company’s website first. Well, at one point before I realized there were two providers with the identical name, I found the Florida Nassau Open MRI. I found that it was accredited, and I was really confused when the accreditation organization returned zero results when I searched it with the New York address. You probably remember from prior episodes how we said that our Nassau Open MRI wasn’t accredited. Once I realized the duplicate name, I was able to sort out all of the Florida provider information, but there was still a lot of confusion. To the best of our knowledge, these two organizations with the exact same name, it’s nothing more than a giant coincidence. They don’t appear to be related companies.
In our episode on MRI safety regulations, we talked about how Medicare and Medicaid providers have conditions of coverage prerequisites from CMS, and how these are generally broad, aspirational hand-waving gestures such as create environments free from harm, create in principle, but if you ask questions like, how am I supposed to achieve that result for MRI, CMS largely shrugs their shoulders and points to the accrediting organizations. You can think of the accrediting organizations, which there are a couple, groups like the ACR, the IAC or RAD site, as CMS muscle. These accrediting organizations take CMS very nonspecific aspirations, and they create specific standards that the imaging center has to comply with. Well, they have to be accredited by one of these organizations if the imaging provider accepts Medicare or Medicaid insurance. If you don’t accept payments from Medicare or Medicaid, the requirements to be accredited and meet the accrediting standards for safety, well, that goes poof. And guess what? Nassau Open MRI apparently did not accept Medicare or Medicaid payments, so they were off the hook for having to comply with any accreditation standards for anything, including safety.
But even if you’re not getting paid by Medicare, which means you don’t have to follow the rules of the accreditation organization, as a health care provider, you still have to be licensed by the state, right? Well, if you’re a hospital, the answer to that question, in the US at least, is almost always yes. But if you’re an outpatient imaging provider, like our Nassau Open MRI was, many states don’t require the facility is licensed, or really that they follow any health care standards at all. As you heard in our MRI Safety Regulations episode, New York is one of many states that’s very hands-off in its approach to safety standards for outpatient imaging providers. In a prior episode, we described how, just a few months before the McAllister accident, an outpatient imaging provider in upstate New York had the pistol of a parent apparently get sucked into the MRI scanner, and how the New York State Department of Health essentially responded with, ‘hey, not my problem.’ It should be plainly obvious how alarming this double standard is. If the same patient gets the same MRI exam on the same type of MRI scanner, the risks are going to be pretty similar from location A to location B. But if you’re getting your MRI at an outpatient facility, in pretty much every state in the US, there’ll be zero state oversight over those risks.
It’s worth taking just a second to contrast what New York and lots of other states really do with respect to X-rays as compared to MRIs. In New York, our terribly acronym, the Bureau of Environmental and Radiation Protection or BERP, regulates just about every medical imaging scanner that emits ionizing radiation like X-rays. So if, hypothetically, Nassau Open MRI also had a bone densitometry or dexa machine, the risks of which are so tiny, they’re almost too small to quantify, BERP would regularly be checking up on this machine, making sure it was working per specifications and that operational safety protocols were in place. But because we’re talking about an MRI machine instead of a dexa scanner, even though the MRI machine has the potential to pull steel objects with huge force, sometimes killing people, will screw up the function of insulin pumps or pacemakers, sometimes killing people, can dangerously heat up people and objects inside them, sometimes burning patients, and are often loud enough that they have caused permanent hearing damage. The MRI scanner is safe enough not to need state oversight. The dexa machine, however, apparently, it’s dangerous enough that it needs to be registered by the state with safety minimums and inspections.
In prior episodes, we told you about how each of the various parties in this incident have all pointed us to their lawyers who invariably shut us out sooner or later. For better or for worse, Nassau Open MRI hasn’t done that. They won’t even really talk with us. We’ve left unreturned messages. Receptionists have told us that we’d have to call back because the person we need to talk with isn’t in. My most recent call to the company got through to the purported office manager, Charlene. It took just a couple of questions before she turned cold and said something like, ‘we’re not interested in providing any information’ and [click] hung up. We weren’t even pawned off on their attorney. They tell us no comment. The company is apparently doing that all on their own.
When we try to dig into the specifics of the company, things get murky really quickly. The New York Secretary of State has a listing for a registered corporation by the name of Nassau Open MRI. But this company, according to the Secretary of State’s website, has also operated under the names of New DORP Open MRI, and before that, Fifth Avenue Open MRI. There are court documents around another different lawsuit that identifies the owners of Nassau Open MRI as Brian and Jason Goldberg. And as Toby mentioned earlier, the company’s old website, nassaumri.com, is back up. But when you call the company’s phone number, they’re now answering it as Red Tree Radiology. The Secretary of State’s website has a corporate registration for Red Tree Radiology that’s actually five years older than the registration for Nassau Open MRI.
A bit of further digging revealed that Red Tree Radiology owned the actual MRI scanner at Nassau Open MRI. At least they did in 2015, according to court documents related to yet another lawsuit. We’re still trying to learn if they owned the MRI that was there in 2025, however. Red Tree Radiology also supposedly provided some sort of management or operations services for Nassau Open MRI for the years prior to the July 2025 accident. This new company name, Red Tree Radiology, was identified in documents related to these other lawsuits as being wholly owned by a Dr. John Rigney. We’ve left messages for Dr. Rigney, but so far haven’t heard back. In that recent call with the office manager, Charlene, the Nassau Open MRI or Red Tree Radiology office manager, whichever one of those names is real, she said that Red Tree was now a custodian for Nassau Open MRI. But if Red Tree owned the MRI scanner and provided management or operations for the center, it sounds to me as if Nassau Open MRI was really only a paper company. And Red Tree, now the custodian of that former company, may have been the main player all along.
If it sounds as if Nassau Open MRI or Red Tree Radiology or New Dorp or Fifth Avenue or whoever this company is has been uncooperative… in a sea of people who aren’t being cooperative, they’re the most uncooperative. But given that the people at the corporate office that Toby talked with on the morning after the accident seemed oblivious to the fact that it happened, maybe the corporate office types aren’t the ones we really should be talking to if we want to understand what happened. If only there was someone from Nassau Open MRI who had firsthand knowledge of what happened on that day. Oh, wait, there is.
The season one sponsor of the Invisible Force podcast is cairereporting.org. That’s CAIRE spelled C-A-I-R-E. cairereporting.org is a confidential MRI adverse incident reporting system, available to the public as well as offering a separate enterprise solution to hospitals and imaging centers for secure, confidential reporting of MRI incidents, accidents and near misses. If you have direct knowledge of an MRI accident that maybe it got 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 MRI accidents. Reports submitted either through the public website or through an enterprise system get reviewed by their experts who then deliver insights into the contributing causes of how accidents or near misses happened and more importantly, steps that could help prevent similar accidents in the future. For more information, please visit cairereporting.org. That’s CAIRE spelled C-A-I-R-E.
Before the break, we gave you a rundown on Nassau Open MRI or Red Tree Radiology and how the company is something of an enigma. They’ve not exactly been helpful or transparent about what happened in the accident or what they’ve been doing since. In a previous episode, we were speculating that there were no state or federal lawsuits for a while because the McAllister family’s attorneys were trying to negotiate a settlement prior to filing, which would keep all of the details of the suit out of the public domain. If our speculation is correct, that would be another reason that the company would be so hostile to the idea of sharing information if they’re trying to negotiate the quietest possible settlement. So it was extra surprising when someone literally stood up in a crowded conference room to volunteer details to Toby.
Last September, so just two months after the accident, I was a guest speaker at the National ARMRIT Conference of MRI Technologists. And I was talking pretty much as I always do about MRI safety. As we dramatized in our little opening radio play, in my talk, I was introducing the closed circuit security camera footage of the McAllister accident when the guy in the audience stood up and interrupted, letting everyone know he is the MRI technologist they were about to see in the video. Man, talk about surprising! Now, some friends at the Magnetic Minds Academy podcast were in the room and they started recording. The audio isn’t great, but they subtitled the video and they let us have a copy and we’re going to be sharing it on the invisibleforcepodcast.com website in the show notes for this episode.
Wait, so he literally stands up in the middle of a crowded room and doxxes himself as the guy from the security camera video?
Believe me, no one was more surprised than I was. They brought him a microphone and then he proceeds to say that he saw the chain around Mr. McAllister’s neck when they first arrived from Mrs. Jones-McAllister’s exam. Now, he also said that when he was taking her, Mrs. Jones-McAllister, into the scanner room, Mr. McAllister wanted to go into the room with his wife to comfort her. The tech said he told Mr. McAllister that if he wanted to come into the MRI scanner room, that no medal was allowed and he would have to put the chain in his car, not have it with him. The tech implied that Mr. McAllister had taken the chain off, but at some later point, he put it back on. The tech also said that when Mr. McAllister came into the room, presumably the seconds immediately before the accident, that the tech told Mr. McAllister to get out of the scanner room and that Mr. McAllister refused that instruction.
Well, that last part doesn’t seem to agree with what we can see on the security cam video. The video doesn’t have audio, so we don’t hear what’s being said, but the tech’s body language doesn’t look like anything close to that level of excitement I’d have if someone on screen walked into an MRI scanner room where I was the tech. The tech is going to the far side of the table when Mr. McAllister enters the room. Now, he’s blocked by the wall for the next several seconds, but what we don’t see is him coming around to where Mr. McAllister is. There’s no hand gestures to stop him or shooing him out of the room, no closing the distance to him. The tech stays on the far side of the table, and instead of getting Mr. McAllister out of the room, on the video, he can be seen joining Mr. McAllister and helping Ms. Jones McAllister sit up. What he said in that conference room doesn’t match what appears to be going on in the video.
And there’s more. After my talk, I went and found him in the audience, and we had about a five-minute chat before the next speaker got started. He told me a few other things in our one-on-one. I can’t exactly remember if this is something he said to the whole room or just to me, but he did say something to the effect of what’s being shown and said on the news coverage isn’t the whole story. ‘If only you had all the facts, you’d be thinking about this differently.’
The implication being that these facts we haven’t been able to see would portray what happened or what he did in a better light?
That’s definitely how I interpreted it. You remember how our public record request to the Nassau County Police Department got swatted away because we didn’t have a release form from an involved person. I later asked the tech if he’d provide us with the release to get the police department’s records so that we could see these facts that would help exonerate him. He turned me down. So, so much for the claim that the facts would help exonerate him, but that piece happened several months later.
So, what else did he say to you?
Well, he said that Mrs. Jones McAllister had been to the imaging center at least a couple of times before, and that Mr. McAllister had accompanied her with the weight training chain around his neck on those previous visits. So, the chain was not a surprise to the tech, not the first time he had seen it. The tech also said that his wife, the tech’s wife had accompanied him to work on that day. She apparently had a doctor’s appointment later in the day, and he was gonna take her to that appointment after he got done with work. Apparently, the tech’s wife and Mr. McAllister were getting along well and the two of them were chatting. At about this point in my conversation with the tech, the next speaker got started, and so I had to kind of cut off our conversation. I didn’t get to ask him where his wife and Mr. McAllister were sitting and having this chat. In many MRI trailers, there’s a small seating area kind of behind the control room, and the fact that the tech was describing how well his wife and Mr. McAllister were getting on, that left me with the impression that they were likely in this seating area where he could have easily overheard their conversations. If that’s correct, that means that both Mr. McAllister and the tech’s wife were inside what’s supposed to be a controlled access area of the MRI suite, the part where everyone and everything are supposed to be screened for MRI safety.
Were you able to talk with him again at the conference and finish that conversation?
I tried to catch him again, but I wasn’t able to. I don’t know if he was laying low or avoiding me, or I was just unlucky and missed him. But while I wasn’t able to catch him, there were other people who were interested in talking to him. Apparently, he did have a sit-down discussion with other folks at the meeting, and then they gave me a download of their conversation with him.
And what did he tell them?
Some of it was more of what he told me, if you only knew all of the facts. But the most interesting bits were things that he hadn’t told me. Things like the tech asserted that Mr. McAllister was outside the trailer and that he ran up the stairs and burst into the MRI area when his wife called out to him. If that’s true, I don’t know how he would have known that Mr. McAllister and his wife were getting on so well. That would also point to a facility level failing to maintain proper access restrictions to the MRI area. The tech also said that he believed that after Mr. McAllister had gotten stuck in the MRI scanner, if he, the tech, if he could just unlock the lock that closed the ends of the chain around Mr. McAllister’s neck, that they’d be able to get that chain off. So he was trying to figure out if Mr. McAllister or Mrs. McAllister had the key. I don’t know if they had the keys or if he ever got it, but apparently that became the tech’s focus or one of his focuses when he realized that pulling the chain off in its current state wasn’t really going to work. He said that he pushed the quench button, but that it didn’t work. You heard that in last episode’s intro radio play. There’s more to that part of the story, and I’ll get to it in just a second. That after the quench button didn’t work, he left the trailer. Remember, the MRI was inside a semi-trailer. He left the trailer, he went outside of the building. He opened the rear cargo doors on the back end of the trailer, and he climbed up into the back of the trailer to get access to the back of the bore, and see if that allowed him to get to the chain or to the lock better than trying to do it from the scanner room side. Apparently, it didn’t. Then when he realized this new position wasn’t helping, he returned back to the inside of the trailer, and it was while he was returning to the trailer that the magnet quenched, and Mr. McAllister was freed.
Was this a result of the Intermed Service Engineer doing something, or was it the magnet quenched way late from the tech pushing the button earlier?
That’s where the story gets weird. Okay, the story gets weirder. Apparently, he didn’t know or at least didn’t say who or what triggered that delayed quench. It sounded as if maybe it had happened while he was returning from the backside of the trailer, but apparently when he talked about pushing the quench button to this other group of people, he talked about pushing the button on the MRI scanner.
On the scanner?!? Attentive listeners may remember in a prior episode where we talked about the different types of emergency buttons associated with MRI scanners. Obviously, there is a quench button typically located on the wall in the scanner room or the control room or ideally both. Then there’s also the emergency power off or EPO button, which turns off power to the MRI scanner, except that it leaves the magnetic field at full strength. Like the quench button, these are typically placed in the MRI scanner room or the control room or again, both. The other emergency button we talked about before is something often referred to as an e-stop button. This is different from the other two because what the e-stop button does is stop any scan that’s running at the time and unlocks the motorized table so that a patient in the bore can be pulled out quickly. Where the quench button and EPO buttons are mounted on the walls and are not part of the MRI scanner, the e-stop button is on the front of the scanner itself. So are you saying that in the beginning, when he pushed the quench button, he was really pushing the e-stop button?
That’s what it sounds like to me.
Well, since there wasn’t a scan running and there was no scan to stop, if he pushed the e-stop button at that time, nothing would obviously change. If he thought it was the quench button, without anything else happening to cue him in that he’d hit the wrong button, he might have just continued in blissful ignorance that he had pushed the wrong button.
That’s what the accounts of those conversations suggested to me.
If that’s correct, then he didn’t need Intermed to race from across town. They didn’t need anyone to hotwire a quench button. They didn’t need to wait roughly an hour that it took to get them out. Someone just needed to push the right button. The Intermed guy, the tech, held one of the first responders.
That’s what this all suggests.
Mr. McAllister was trapped by a chain, pulling against his throat with 1,000 pounds of force for the better part of an hour because the wrong button was being pushed?!? I’m almost speechless and that’s saying something.
I’ll give you some time to regain your composure because as we promised before, we are absolutely going to share our personal thoughts about this accident, what ought to have happened and what stupid stuff that happened that really shouldn’t have. That’s for a future episode. Oh, hey, attorneys, if you’re on this case and you want some free expert witness work, make sure that you’re tuning in to that future episode. Now, as we bring this episode to a close on this bombshell of a revelation, this also represents the closing of what we’re calling Act 2 of this series. The next several episodes, our Act 3, are going to include a fuller reconstruction of the events based on all of the details we’ve learned since, that promised evaluation by both John and me on what ought to have been done differently as well as follow-ups on whether or not any changes are afoot within the state of New York or New York State Department of Health to help make sure that other MRI patients in the Empire State have some guaranteed minimum safety protections, protections that MRI patients don’t have today in New York or really in any of the US states.
“Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the conference. My name is Tobias Gilk. I’d like to thank you for joining me so early on the first day. I’m about to play for you a video that shows the horrific MRI accident that occurred just a few months ago in New York. Now, while the video isn’t graphic, there’s not blood and gore, I will say that it’s impactful, and it’s something that you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. Now, if you’d rather not watch, I completely understand…”
“Just so you know, that video you’re about to show, that’s me.”
“Could you repeat that?”
“I am the tech in that video you’re about to play.”
[crowd gasps]
Next episode, we’re going to recap the original story with all of the new detail that we’ve learned along the way. Then, over the next few episodes, start to look at how me, you, your loved ones can be sure to be safe for MRI exams. If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re subscribed to the Invisible Force Podcast to get each of the new episodes as they drop.
For this week’s show, our sources were the conference recordings made by the folks from Magnetic Minds Academy podcast at the 2025 ARMRIT Annual Meeting in Las Vegas. By the way, check out Magnetic Minds Academy. The personal conversations between me and that Nassau Open MRI technologist, accounts of others who also talk to the tech, are attempts at connecting with Nassau Open MRI and Red Tree Radiology, or whoever they are, as well as some confidential sources.
Our opening radio play, which dramatizes that ARMRIT Meeting where the tech stood up and interrupted my presentation, that was voiced by both me and Mischa Stanton.
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 are always available there. Also, you can leave us a voicemail with information about this incident or any MRI accidents at area code 631-MRI-TIPS. The number again, 631-MRI-TIPS or 631-674-8477.
Finally, we ask you to like and share our podcast with your friends or colleagues or 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.
Oh, oh hey, are you still here? Good, because I got a little update for you. So we don’t usually do these little epilogue pieces, but after John and I recorded this episode, we got some information because that lawsuit that we have been speculating all about, well, that lawsuit got filed after we recorded. And we’re gonna have to be doing some digging because in addition to the fact that Adrian Jones McAllister sued Nassau Open MRI, they also sued East Coast Radiology, Sun Enterprises and GM Partners Westbury.
Now, not named in the lawsuit is the MR tech, but there are these other organizations. Now, some of them we had come across in other legal filings and doing our digging, but some of them are new. I
n addition to the new parties in the lawsuit that we will be digging into, Mrs. Jones McAllister apparently has a new attorney. So this lawsuit was filed by an attorney Andrew Finkelstein from Jacoby Myers. Now the filing says that it is both from Jacoby Myers and from the Ben Crump firm. So it would appear that Smith Cheung Lauterborn, or Smith Lauterborn Cheung, is no longer representing Adrian Jones McAllister in this suit. It now appears that Jacoby Myers has sort of taken the Lauterborn seat in all of this.
Anyway, I wanted to jump in here and I wanted to share this with you because we are on top of these changes and we will continue to be looking into them. And we just wanted to share with that with you. Anyway, thanks for listening Beyond the Credits. And stay tuned for more episodes where we are going to continue to dig in, get the details of this story, all with the aim of creating safer MRI for you, for me, and for our loved ones.
Thank you for listening to the Invisible Force Podcast.
