The wife of the man who died after being sucked into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine has spoken out.
Keith McAllister was fatally injured in a freak accident on Wednesday (16 July) at Nassua Open MRI in Westbury, New York.
The 61-year-old’s wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, was by his side when she watched the machine ‘snatch him’ at the private facility.
Police received a 911 call just after 4:30 pm local time, hearing that a man had experienced a ‘medical episode’ after getting caught in one of the machines.
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An update two days later shared that he had ‘succumbed to his injuries and was declared deceased by a hospital physician'.
Adrienne had been having an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to bring her husband in to help her up.
Keith had been wearing a ‘large metallic chain around his neck’, leading him to be ‘drawn into the machine’ because of its powerful magnetic force.
His wife said he was let into the room despite of the 20-lb. chain he was wearing.
Adrienne told News 12 Long Island: “In that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in, and he hit the MRI.”
She tried, along with the technician, to pull Keith off the machine but couldn’t manage it.
“I was saying, ‘Could you turn off the machine? Call 911. Do something. Turn this damn thing off!’” she recalled.
While MRI machines can be vital in saving people’s lives or giving important diagnoses, the strong magnets inside can make them dangerous.
According to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the force of it is so powerful that it’s ‘strong enough to fling a wheelchair across the room’.
In the UK, the NHS advises patients to remove any metal objects that may be on their body, such as watches, piercings and hearing aids.
Adrienne claimed that it wasn’t the couple’s first time at the facility, or apparently the first time that the employee had seen the man’s chain which he used for weight training purposes.
She alleged: “They had a conversation about it before, 'Oh that’s a big chain'.”
Having loved her husband ‘so much’, Adrienne is still trying to ‘wrap her head around the thing’ as she has been struggling since his death.
“He waved goodbye to me, and his whole body went limp,” she added.
Nassau County Police Department have launched an investigation into the incident.
Topics: New York, Health, Technology, US News
Jess Battison