Keith McAllister sustained serious injuries when he was pulled into an MRI machine by his necklace and eventually died as a result of his wounds, according to Nassau County Police. The accident occurred on the afternoon of July 16 at the Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, Long Island.
Adrienne Jones-McAllister, his wife, recently described the terrifying incident of her husband being pulled into an MRI machine to News12 Long Island. She explained that she had an MRI on her knee and needed assistance getting up on the day of the tragic incident. She asked that the technician call her husband to assist her in getting off the table.
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Even though her husband was wearing his 20-pound chain, which Jones-McAllister claimed he used for weight training, the technician went to fetch him and let him into the room.
She explained that this was not the first time she and her husband had visited Nassau Open MRI, and he had previously worn the chain there.
“That was not the first time that guy has seen that chain. They had a conversation about it before,” she told News12 Long Island.
According to Jones-McAllister, she watched her 61-year-old husband approach the table and saw the machine “snatch him.”
“At that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in, and he hit the MRI,” Jones-McAllister recalled. She stated that she and the technician attempted to remove her spouse from the machine.
“I’m saying, ‘Could you turn off the machine? Call 911. Do something. Turn this damn thing off!’”
The grieving widow said he suffered several heart attacks following the incident and later died.
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“He went limp in my arms, and this is still pulsating in my brain,” she lamented.
In Nassau County police reports, they noted that the man’s entry to the room “while the scan was in progress” was not authorized. The investigation is ongoing, police said, according to CNN.
According to the US Food and Drug Administration, MRI machines have magnetic fields that will attract magnetic objects of all size—keys, mobile phones and even oxygen tanks—which “may cause damage to the scanner or injury to the patient or medical professionals if those objects become projectiles.”
