FOIAengine: Before CPSC officials renewed a Casely charger warning, a personal-injury lawyer sought the records behind the recall.
About 15 minutes into a flight from Wichita to Seattle, a passenger’s portable phone charger exploded.
Leana Stickler was sitting beside her. The battery pack had been resting on the woman’s lap as she charged her phone. Suddenly, Stickler told Wichita television station KAKE, flames shot about a foot into the air. The woman, burned on her arms and legs, tossed the device into the aisle.
“Somebody threw a towel on it, and I hit it with my shoe,” Stickler said.
Flight attendants rushed in with a fire extinguisher. Smoke filled the cabin. Passenger Tracy Soom told KAKE she feared the airplane would crash.
Alaska Airlines Flight 2117 returned to Wichita on February 22, 2026. Three passengers were evaluated, and one was taken to a hospital. The airline said flight attendants placed the phone and power bank into a “containment bag.”
The episode appears to match an airplane fire that federal safety officials later attributed to a recalled Casely portable charger. Their account described a 47-year-old woman who was burned when her power bank caught fire and exploded aboard an airplane in February. The Consumer Product Safety Commission did not identify the flight, and KAKE did not identify the charger’s brand.
Three days after the Wichita flight, a San Francisco personal-injury lawyer filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CPSC, seeking the records behind the Casely recall.
The February 25 request from lawyer Thomas Brandi, captured in FOIAengine, sought “all writings pertaining to the recall” of Casely’s E33A Power Pods. It preceded by 50 days a renewed federal warning that disclosed both the airplane fire and another, fatal episode.
FOIA requests to the federal government can be an important early warning of bad publicity, litigation to come, or uncertainties to be hedged and gamed out. They can also be a stand-in for civil discovery, as we’ve noted in the past. See, most recently, our January 22 article, “How Lawyers Use FOIA for Radically Different Agendas.”
FOIAengine recently added CPSC’s FOIA requests to its database. This week and next, we’re examining those files to see how lawyers use the agency’s records to investigate product hazards and gather evidence.
The aftermath of the Casely recall illustrates how lawyers use FOIA to seek evidence for product-liability claims. A recall simply tells consumers to stop using a dangerous product. But the underlying agency records can help lawyers investigate how the danger developed, and who bears responsibility.
In this case, the chronology raises a question central to product-liability claims: who knew what, and when?
The Casely portable charger at the center of this story was the subject of two recall notices. But it wasn’t until the April 2026 reannouncement of the Casely recall that a fatality from almost two years earlier was disclosed. That fatal injury was from a charger fire that occurred in August 2024 – eight months before the first of two recall announcements. The fatal incident was absent from the original April 2025 notice jointly issued by Casely and the CPSC.
We asked Casely, the CPSC, and lawyer Brandi to respond to the details that follow. The CPSC and Brandi did not reply. Casely acknowledged receiving our questions but did not answer them.
A warning grows more serious
Casely’s Power Pods were small, portable wireless chargers, sold in a variety of colors and prints. The recalled model, E33A, contained a lithium-ion battery and sold for $30 to $70 through Casely’s website, Amazon, and other online sellers from March 2022 through September 2024.
The first public recall came on April 17, 2025. Casely and CPSC announced a voluntary recall of approximately 429,200 units because their batteries could overheat and ignite.
According to the original CPSC recall notice, Casely had received 51 reports of batteries overheating, expanding or catching fire while customers charged their phones. Six minor burn injuries were reported.
Amid so many warnings about the dangers of overheating lithium batteries, a recall notice that mentioned only a few minor burns might have been easy to miss. Consumers were instructed to stop using the chargers and contact Casely for free replacements. To obtain a replacement, consumers had to upload two photographs: one showing the model number and another showing “Recalled” and the date written on the charger in permanent marker. Consumers were also told to dispose of the batteries according to local requirements.
A year later, on April 16, 2026, CPSC and Casely reannounced the recall. The reannouncement covered the same approximately 429,200 chargers. But the disclosed consequences had grown considerably more serious.
In that April reannouncement, CPSC officials reported that 28 additional consumer reports had been received since the original announcement. Among them were the airplane fire and the death of a 75-year-old New Jersey woman.
The woman who later died had been charging her cellphone with a recalled E33A Power Pod on her lap in August 2024 when it caught fire and exploded. She suffered second- and third-degree burns and later died from complications of her injuries, according to the CPSC. The accident occurred about eight months before the original recall. That notice mentioned six minor burn injuries, but did not disclose the New Jersey incident or the woman’s subsequent death.
The lawyer was already investigating
Lawyer Thomas Brandi’s involvement also began before the renewed warning.
On November 6, 2025, the Brandi Law Firm announced that it represented a woman who was seriously injured when a Casely Power Pod exploded while she was using her phone. The firm did not identify her or specify the date of her accident. Its announcement cited the original recall and invited others with similar experiences to contact the firm. (Docket Alarm counts nine cases filed against Casely since the first recall.)
By February 25, Brandi was seeking CPSC’s recall records.
His request was broad. Rather than asking for a particular incident report or correspondence with one company official, he sought all writings pertaining to the recall. By filing a FOIA request with CPSC, the injury lawyer was able to pursue the government’s evidence while the public account of the product’s hazards was still developing.
By April 30, the Brandi firm was publicly reporting two injury clients.
Beyond the recall notice
For now, the documented sequence is clear: an original recall describing six minor burn injuries; a law firm disclosing a seriously injured client; a FOIA request for the agency’s records; and a renewed warning describing an airplane fire and a death.
As the public warning grew more urgent, the lawyer’s search for the records behind it was already underway.
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Next: More FOIA requests to the Consumer Product Safety Commission
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John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. He is the author of The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. His latest book is Summer of ’71: Five Months That Changed America, about the fateful year before Watergate. Click here to watch the official book trailer. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.
