A tragic incident unfolded at a Long Island imaging center last Wednesday, when a 61-year-old man was killed after a heavy metal necklace he wore was yanked into an active MRI machine.
Keith McAllister had accompanied his wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, to Nassau Open MRI in New York for her routine knee scan. According to News 12 Long Island, she asked a technician to bring her husband into the room to help her off the table. That’s when disaster struck.
McAllister, who was wearing a 20-pound weight-training necklace, entered the MRI suite — unaware that the machine was still powered on. The necklace was instantly pulled into the machine’s magnetic field, dragging McAllister with it.
“At that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in and he hit the MRI,” Jones-McAllister recounted. “He waved goodbye to me and then his whole body went limp.”
Panicked, she begged staff to turn off the machine and call 911. McAllister was rushed to a nearby hospital but died the following afternoon.
“He was just trying to help me,” she said through tears. “Now he’s gone.”
Nassau County Police confirmed the incident, while Nassau Open MRI has so far declined to comment. Attempts to reach the facility for further details went unanswered, News 12 reported.
This isn’t the first fatality involving MRI machines. In 2001, a six-year-old boy died in Westchester Medical Center after an oxygen tank was accidentally brought into the MRI room. The family later reached a $2.9 million settlement.
MRI machines generate powerful magnetic fields that can turn nearby metal into deadly projectiles. The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering warns that even seemingly innocuous objects like wheelchairs or jewelry can pose serious risks.
