Footage of an elderly man being sucked into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine due to his 20-pound metallic chain has emerged. The incident resulted in the death of sixty-one-year-old Keith McAllister, who was assisting his wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, Long Island.
The couple visited the clinic for Adrienne to undergo an MRI on her knee, according to the grieving wife. While he accompanied her there, the police noted that he did not receive authorisation to enter the room with her while the scan was in progress. Initially, his wife entered the scanning area alone.
After telling the technician to get Keith, Adrienne yelled for him to come and assist her after the scan. Her husband entered the room and was in the middle of helping her when the machine pulled him in.
Footage captured them near the machine, and moments later, Keith is pulled inside. The police described Keith’s jewellery as a “large metallic chain” that was drawn by the machine’s metallic forces.
Adrienne confirmed that the chain he was wearing was 20 pounds in weight and featured a lock he used for weight training. When the machine pulled the chain and he struck it, she and the technician leapt into action, attempting to pull him away. She said she urged the technician to quickly help him, repeatedly telling him to switch the machine off and call the police.
She was in tears when she recounted the moment she felt her husband go limp in her arms. Keith was ultimately rushed to the hospital in a critical condition, but he succumbed to his injuries the next day. The police have since launched an investigation into the bizarre death.
While strange incidents like these have happened before, they are extremely rare. A similar incident happened in 2001, when the magnetic force of an MRI machine at a New York hospital caused a metal oxygen tank to fly across the room. A 6-year-old boy was killed by blunt force trauma after the tank struck him.
