WESTBURY, N.Y. (AP) — A man who was pulled by an MRI machine in New York after entering the room wearing a large weight training chain around his neck told a local TV outlet that he bid farewell before his body stepped in, police and his wife.
The 61-year-old was in the MRI room, but a scan was underway at the Nassau Open MRI on Wednesday afternoon. According to a release from the Nassau County Police Department, the machine’s strong magnetic force pulled him near a metal chain around his neck.
He passed away Thursday afternoon, but an officer answering a call in the Nassau County Police District, where the MRI facility is located, said he has not yet been granted permission to make his name public on Saturday.
Adrienne Jones-Mcallister told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her lap when she asked the technician to help Keith McAllister get off the table. She said she called out to him.
She told News 12 that the engineer had been summoned to her husband’s room. He wore a 20-pound chain that he used for weight training. This is, “ooooooh, that’s a big chain!”
As he approached her, she said, “At that moment the machine switched him, pulled him, hit an MRI.”
“I said: ‘You turn the machine off, call 911, do something, turn off this damn thing!” she recalled. “He stepped into my arm.”
She said she helped the technician to try to separate her husband from the machine, but that was not possible.
“He said goodbye to me and then his whole body limped,” Jones McAllister told the TV outlet.
Jones-Mcallister told News12 that McAllister had a heart attack after being released from the MRI machine.
Those who answered the call at the Nassau Open MRI on Long Island declined to comment Friday. The phone number was not answered on Saturday.
It was not the first New York death that emerged from the MRI machine.
In 2001, Michael Colombini, six-year-old from Croton-on-Hudson, was killed at Westchester Medical Center when an oxygen tank drawn into the chamber, jumped into the chamber, pulled into the 10-ton electromagnets.
Records filed in Westchester County in 2010 revealed that the family had settled a $2.9 million lawsuit.
According to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, MRI machines can “use a powerful magnetic field” and “expand very powerful forces on iron, some steel and other magnetizable objects.”
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