Wife's horrifying reaction as husband dies after being sucked into MRI machine over large chain
The grieving wife of a man who tragically died after being sucked into an MRI machine in New York has said she can't get that image out of her head.
Keith McAllister, 61, was critically injured when he was pulled into the machine by his necklace at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, Long Island, on Wednesday afternoon. He died from his injuries, Nassau County police said.
Speaking out for the first time since the tragedy, the man's wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, said she had an MRI on her knee and needed help getting up, so she asked the technician to get her husband so he could help her get off the table. When undergoing an MRI scan, patients and all people in the room where the procedure is carried out are asked to remove all jewellery and piercings to remain safe because the machine generates strong magnetic fields.
However, Ms Jones-McAllister said the technician allowed her husband to enter the room even though he was wearing a 20-pound weight-training chain. Sharing her horrifying account of the incident, she told News 12 Long Island that she saw her husband walk toward the table and the machine "snatch him" immediately.
When he got close to her, she said "at that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in and he hit the MRI." As tears ran down her face, she recalled: "I said: 'Could you turn off the machine, call 911, do something, Turn this damn thing off!'"
"He went limp in my arms, and this is still pulsating in my brain," the heartbroken woman said. 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," she told the TV outlet.
Her husband suffered several heart attacks after being freed from the machine and later died, she said. Ms Jones-McAllister claimed it wasn't the first time she and her husband had been at Nassau Open MRI, and said he had worn his chain there before.
She said: "That was not the first time that guy has seen that chain. They had a conversation about it before." She claimed previous comments included: "Ooooooh, that's a big chain!" It wasn't the first New York death to result from an MRI machine.
In 2001, six-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."
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