Man, 61, dies after being sucked into medical imaging machine by his metallic necklace
The 61-year-old, identified as Keith McAllister, succumbed to his injuries a day after the freak accident at a clinic in Westbury, New York, on Wednesday.
Police said the man was dragged into the medical machine by his 'large metal chain' after reportedly defying orders to stay out of the room.
The Nassau County Police Department said the man walked into the MRI room at the Nassau County Open MRI facility while a scan was in progress and was pulled into the machine.
One witness told CBS News he had defied orders to stay out of the room after he heard his relative screaming from inside and got concerned.
His wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, had just completed an MRI on her knee and asked a technician to bring her husband in to help her off the table.
When McAllister entered the room - still wearing the 20lb metal chain his wife said he 'used for weight training' - the machine's powerful magnetic force suddenly pulled him in.
'I saw him walk toward the table and then the machine just snatched him,' Jones-McAllister recalled to News 12 Long Island.
'He went limp in my arms - and this is still pulsating in my brain.'
She alleged that the technician allowed her husband into the room despite the visible chain, which had been worn on previous visits to the same facility.
'That was not the first time that guy had seen that chain. They'd had a conversation about it before,' she said.
After the incident, McAllister suffered multiple heart attacks and later died from his injuries, she said.
McAllister's stepdaughter, Samantha Bodden, echoed her mother's sentiment, blaming the technician for her stepfather's premature death.
'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.
She also pushed back against claims reported by 'several news stations' that McAllister was not authorized 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.
Jones-McAllister told News 12 that she had called out to her husband after asking the technician to get him.
She said the technician summoned him into the room, despite his wearing the heavy chain - an item they had even joked about on a previous visit, saying things like: '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.'
She added that the technician tried to help her pull McAllister off the machine, but it was impossible.
An investigation is continuing, but police have said there is no criminality involved and it appears to have been an accident.
An official cause of death has yet to be released in the incident, but one staff doctor at North Shore University Hospital speculated on a potential cause.
Dr Payal Sud told CBS: 'If this was a chain that was wrapped around the neck, I could imagine any kind of strangulation injuries that could happen. Asphyxiation, cervical spine injuries.'
When undergoing an MRI procedure, patients are generally asked to remove all jewelry and piercings to remain safe.
The machine generates strong magnetic fields and radio waves to create detailed internal images of the human body.
The magnetic pull is so strong that it is capable of throwing a wheelchair across a room, according to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
When undergoing an MRI procedure, patients are generally asked to remove all jewelry and piercings to remain safe.
Injuries and deaths from MRI machines, while rare, have happened in the past.
In 2001, a six-year-old boy was killed at Westchester Medical Center in New York when an metal oxygen tank was pulled into the machine while he was being scanned.
And in 2018 a man died in India when he entered an MRI room holding an oxygen tank.
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