The former safety manager of an alternative health care center in Michigan was sentenced to more than a year in prison this week in connection with the explosion of an oxygen-rich hyperbaric chamber that killed a 5-year-old boy last year.
Jeffrey Mosteller, 66, pleaded no contest in Oakland County Circuit Court on Monday to involuntary manslaughter. He will spend at least 19 months in prison under the terms of a plea agreement. (The sentence could stretch, depending on his conduct in prison, to as much as 15 years, the maximum penalty for the charge he faced.)
The boy, Thomas Cooper, of Royal Oak, Mich., was receiving treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and sleep apnea at the Oxford Center in Troy, Mich., when a fire started inside the hyperbaric chamber, setting off the explosion.
The boy was killed and his mother, who was standing near the chamber, was injured, according to the authorities.
Mr. Mosteller was one of four former Oxford Center employees who have been charged in connection with Thomas’s death. The other three are awaiting trial: the center’s owner and its primary management assistant, who are facing second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter counts, and the chamber’s operator, who is facing an involuntary manslaughter charge.
A lawyer for Mr. Mosteller, Alona Sharon, declined to comment on Wednesday.
The Michigan attorney general’s office could not be reached for comment.
“A young child lost his life in a completely preventable tragedy because this defendant allowed an outdated device to operate in defiance of safety standards,” the attorney general, Dana Nessel, said in a statement announcing the plea deal with Mr. Mosteller in July. “While no outcome can reverse this loss, it is my hope that this conviction provides a sense of justice to Thomas’s family.”
According to its website, which has since been taken down, the Oxford Center was founded in 2008 and provided therapy to patients through a variety of services, including hyperbaric chambers and neurofeedback brain therapy.
Hyperbaric chambers can provide lifesaving treatment for people with conditions such as air bubbles in their blood vessels or decompression sickness, also known as the bends. The Oxford Center also used hyperbaric oxygen therapy for children with various health conditions, including autism, A.D.H.D. and autoimmune diseases, according to its website. None of these conditions are on the Food and Drug Administration’s approved list of conditions cleared to be treated with hyperbaric chambers.
The air pressure inside a hyperbaric chamber — a large glass tube that resembles a sleeping pod from a science-fiction movie — is two to three times higher than normal, according to the Mayo Clinic’s website.
The high pressure, together with the elevated oxygen levels — about 100 percent oxygen, compared with about 21 percent in the air that we normally breathe — inside the chamber can also provide therapeutic advantages.
But “the presence of such a high amount of oxygen in a pressurized environment” can make the chambers “extremely combustible,” the Troy Fire Department said in a statement after the explosion.
When she announced the criminal charges in March 2025, Ms. Nessel listed several required safety standards that she said were disregarded when Thomas was being treated at the Oxford Center. She accused the center of not performing a daily maintenance check or doing a safety check with the patient before his treatment. Ms. Nessel also said that no medical doctors or safety supervisors were on the premises at the time, and that the treatment was not performed by licensed technicians.
“This tragedy could have been prevented if proper safety protocols were followed,” Ms. Nessel said in a statement at the time.
Thomas’s family filed a civil wrongful death lawsuit. That case is pending.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research
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