A man who wore a large weight-training chain around his neck and approached his wife while a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine scanned her knee at a clinic in New York died after the device forcefully pulled him, according to police and media reports.
Keith McAllister, 61, was killed at the Nassau Open MRI clinic in Westbury, Long Island, after he accompanied his wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, there on 16 July.
Adrienne told the local outlet News 12 Long Island that an MRI machine there was scanning her knee when she called out to her husband, “Keith, come help me up” from the table. The technician operating the machine – which looks like a long, narrow tube with openings on each end – then allowed Keith to walk in while he donned a nearly 20lb (9kg) metal chain that he used for weight training.
Police in Nassau county, New York, said Keith was then sucked into the device by its potent magnetic force. He endured “a medical episode” at that point which left him in critical condition at a hospital, and he was pronounced dead a day later, police said.
Adrienne told News 12 that her late husband had suffered several heart attacks after the incident with the MRI machine and before his death. She recalled, through tears, “seeing the machine snatch him and pull him into the machine”.
She said she implored for the clinic to call for emergency help and, referring to the machine, to “turn this damn thing off!”
But eventually Keith “went limp in my arms,” Adrienne recounted. “This is still pulsating in my brain.”
Adrienne told News 12 that she and her husband had previously been to Nassau Open MRI, and he had worn his weight-training chain there before.
“This was not the first time that guy [had] seen that chain,” Adrienne said to the station. “They had a conversation about it before.”
A person who picked up a phone call to Nassau Open MRI on Monday said the facility had no comment.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates MRI safety and warns that scans with the technology can create a “strong, static magnetic field” that poses physical hazards. The agency says that “careful screening of people and objects entering the MRI environment is critical to ensure nothing enters the magnet area that may become a projectile” and dangerous to anyone nearby.
The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, meanwhile, cautions that MRI machines exerts “very powerful forces on objects of iron, some steels and other magnetizable objects” and have the strength “to fling a wheelchair across the room”.
McAllister was not the first person killed by an MRI machine in New York. In 2001, Michael Colombini, 6, died when an oxygen tank flew into an MRI chamber that he was in, having been pulled in by the machine at a medical center in Westchester county.
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