The distraught spouse of a guy from Long Island who died after being drawn inside an MRI scanner is accusing the imaging tech of being responsible for his demise.
Keith McAllister, 61, suffered severe injuries Wednesday afternoon at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury as his metal chain violently pulled him into the scanner.
His injuries later claimed his life, Nassau County police said.
Adrienne Jones-McAllister, his wife, requested that a technician call her husband in to assist her in getting off the table after she had just finished an MRI on her knee.
The machine’s strong magnetic attraction drew McAllister in as soon as he walked in the door, still wearing the 20-pound metal chain his wife claimed he “used for weight training.”
Jones-McAllister told News 12 Long Island, “I saw him walk toward the table and then the machine just snatched him.”
“He went limp in my arms – and this is still pulsating in my brain.”
She claimed that in spite of the obvious chain, which had been worn during earlier visits to the same facility, the technician let her husband inside the room.
“That was not the first time that guy had seen that chain. They’d had a conversation about it before,” she said.
According to her, McAllister had many heart attacks following the incident and eventually passed away from his wounds.
Samantha Bodden, McAllister’s stepdaughter, agreed with her mother and blamed the technician for her stepfather’s untimely demise.
“While my mother was laying on the table, the technician left the room to get her husband to help her off the table. He forgot to inform him to take the chain he was wearing from around his neck off when the magnet sucked him in,” Bodden wrote on Facebook Friday.
Furthermore, she refuted reports from’several news stations’ that McAllister was not permitted to be in the room.
“Several news stations are saying he wasn’t authorized to be in the room, when in fact he was because the technician went and brought him into the room,” she wrote on a GoFundMe page organized to help cover burial expenses.
The Nassau County Police Department said in a press statement that McAllister entered the MRI room while a scan was still in progress and was drawn in by the metallic chain around his neck by the machine’s powerful magnetic force.
Jones-McAllister told News 12 that after requesting that the technician get her husband, she had yelled out to him.
She claimed that even though he was wearing the bulky chain—about which they had even made light at a prior visit—the technician called him into the room, remarking, “Ooooooh, that’s a big chain!”
When he got close to her, she said, “at that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in, and he hit the MRI.”
I said: “Could you turn off the machine, call 911, do something – turn this damn thing off!” she recalled, as tears ran down her face. “He went limp in my arms.”
The technician attempted, but was unable, to assist her in removing McAllister from the machine, she said.
“My mother and the tech tried for several minutes to release him before the police were called. He was attached to the machine for almost an hour before they could release the chain…” Bodden added in the somber Facebook entry.
