A man tragically lost his life in New York after being pulled into an MRI machine due to a heavy chain around his neck. According to police and his wife, he managed to wave goodbye before becoming unresponsive.
The incident occurred when the 61-year-old man entered the MRI room while the machine was in use at Nassau Open MRI. The powerful magnetic pull of the machine attracted the metal chain he was wearing, as reported by the Nassau County Police Department.
He passed away on Thursday afternoon. However, a police officer at the Nassau County precinct where the MRI facility is situated mentioned that they had not yet received authorization to release his name as of Saturday.
Adrienne Jones-McAllister told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband, Keith McAllister, to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
She told News 12 that the technician summoned into the room her husband, who was wearing a 20-pound chain that he uses for weight training, an object they’d had a casual conversation about during a previous visit with comments like: “Ooooooh, that’s a big chain!”
When he got close to her, she said, “at that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in and he hit the MRI.”
“I said: ‘Could you turn off the machine, call 911, do something, Turn this damn thing off!’” she recalled, as tears ran down her face. “He went limp in my arms.”
She said the technician helped her try to pull her husband off the machine but it was impossible.
“He waved goodbye to me and then his whole body went limp,” Jones-McAllister told the TV outlet.
Jones-McAllister told News 12 that McAllister suffered heart attacks after he was freed from the MRI machine.
A person who answered the phone at Nassau Open MRI on Long Island declined to comment Friday. The phone number went unanswered on Saturday.
It wasn’t the first New York death to result from an MRI machine.
In 2001, 6-year-old Michael Colombini of Croton-on-Hudson was killed at the Westchester Medical Center when an oxygen tank flew into the chamber, drawn in by the MRI’s 10-ton electromagnet.
In 2010, records filed in Westchester County revealed that the family settled a lawsuit for $2.9 million.
MRI machines “employ a strong magnetic field” that “exerts very powerful forces on objects of iron, some steels, and other magnetizable objects,” according to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, which says the units are “strong enough to fling a wheelchair across the room.”
