A twisted X-ray technician has been busted for assaulting two women — one of them 83 years old — at Kings County Hospital, the Daily News has learned.
Larry Jones, 65, of Lower Manhattan was cuffed late Saturday after allegedly molesting the victims in an X-ray room at the city-run hospital in Brooklyn.
The elderly woman told police she went to the emergency room at the hospital on Saturday to have X-rays of an arm and a knee taken, sources said.
At about 12:30 p.m., she was brought to a room where Jones was slated to take the X-rays. He and the woman were alone when he took an initial photograph and then moved in to reposition her legs, sources said.
But he yanked off her underwear and assaulted her, according to the sources. They said the perv tech then allegedly put her on a gurney and wheeled her back to the emergency room.
The woman then notified a clerk who contacted an administrator and then the hospital’s police, sources said.
The second victim, a 57-year-old woman, told a similar story. She said she was brought to the X-ray room for pictures of her chest and ankles at about 5:30 p.m.
After taking an initial photograph, Jones repositioned her legs, then told her her underwear was interfering with the X-ray. He then pushed aside her underwear and molested her.
She began screaming, and Jones wheeled her into the hallway and then the emergency room, sources said.
She called out to her waiting daughter, who immediately told a hospital police officer, sources said. Later, when she was being brought to another part of the hospital, she spotted Jones and pointed him out to hospital security. They took Jones into custody and called the NYPD.
Jones, who was listed as living in a homeless shelter, was working in the radiology department even though he had been arrested eight times, officials said. He’d been employed there since 2003, and is a certified X-Ray tech.
Five of his arrests were for petty crime and three are sealed. None of the offenses involved sex crimes.
Jones was charged with sex abuse, committing a criminal sexual act, forcible touching and sexual abuse in connection with the assaults, police said.
He was arraigned Sunday and ordered held on $7,500 bail, court records show.
Hospital officials fired Jones after his arrest.
“We are committed to the safety of our patients have zero tolerance for such behavior and consider this a very serious allegation,” a spokesperson said. “Our hospital acted swiftly in response to the patient’s complaint, and we immediately terminated the individual.”
The incident is another embarrassment for a hospital that has been at the center of controversy over the past decade.
In 2007, the hospital was sued because its psychiatric emergency room was a “chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger.”
In 2008, 49-year-old Esmin Green died on the floor of the hospital’s psychiatric emergency room. The city settled a lawsuit brought by her family for $2 million, and the city Health and Hospitals Corp. accepted responsibility for her death.
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice found conditions in the psychiatric facilities of the hospital were “highly dangerous,” and required “immediate attention.”
The lawsuit led to federal oversight of the hospital’s treatment of the mentally ill for the past six years.
In June, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn filed a letter with the court stating that “the care and treatment of individuals at KCH is now quite good.”
