The distressed spouse of a Long Island man who passed away after being pulled into an MRI scanner is blaming the imaging technician for his death.
At Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, Keith McAllister, 61, was severely injured Wednesday afternoon when his metal chain yanked him violently into the scanner.
According to Nassau County police, he died as a result of his injuries.
His wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, had just finished an MRI on her knee when she asked a technician to call her husband in to help her get off the table.
McAllister, still wearing the 20-pound metal chain his wife said he “used for weight training,” was drawn in by the machine’s powerful magnetic pull as soon as he entered.
“I saw him walk toward the table and then the machine just snatched him,” Jones-McAllister told News 12 Long Island.
“This is still pulsing in my brain—he went limp in my arms.”
She asserted that the technician allowed her husband to enter the room despite the obvious chain, which had been worn on previous visits to the same facility.
“That guy had seen that chain previously. They had previously discussed it,” she remarked.
She claims that after the incident, McAllister suffered numerous heart attacks and ultimately died from his injuries.
McAllister’s stepdaughter, Samantha Bodden, concurred with her mother and held the technician accountable for her stepfather’s premature death.
The technician left the room to ask her husband to assist my mother in getting off the table while she was lying on it. When the magnet sucked him in, he neglected to tell him to remove the chain around his neck, Bodden wrote on Facebook Friday.
She also denied claims made by “a number of news outlets” that McAllister was not allowed in the room.
On a GoFundMe page set up to assist with burial costs, she wrote, “A number of news outlets are claiming he wasn’t permitted to be in the room, but in reality he was because the technician went and brought him into the room.”
According to a press release from the Nassau County Police Department, McAllister entered the MRI room while the scan was still underway and was pulled in by the strong magnetic pull of the metal chain around his neck.
Jones-McAllister told News 12 that she had yelled out to her husband after asking the technician to get him.
According to her, the technician called him into the room and said, “Ooooooh, that’s a big chain!” despite the fact that he was wearing the heavy chain, which they had even joked about during a previous visit.
She claimed that “the machine switched him around, pulled him in, and he hit the MRI at that instant” as he approached her.
“Could you shut off the machine, dial 911, or do something else—turn this fucking thing off!” I said. She remembered, tears streaming down her cheeks. “In my arms, he went limp.”
She claimed that the technician tried to help her remove McAllister from the machine but was unsuccessful.
Before the police were called, my mother and the technician attempted to free him for a few minutes. Before the chain could be released, he was fastened to the machine for nearly an hour. In the solemn Facebook post, Bodden added.