A ‘loving’ grandfather was choked for almost an hour after the magnetic field of an MRI machine caught a large chain around his neck, his step-daughter said.
Keith McAllister, 61, entered the room after his wife Adrienne had her knee scan done at Nassau Open MRI in New York on Wednesday.
He was wearing a 20-pound chain that he uses for weight training, an object they’d had a casual conversation about during a previous visit with comments from the technician like: ‘Ooooooh, that’s a big chain!’
He was quickly drawn in by the machine’s strong magnetic force, police said.
His family said Keith was pinned to the machine for nearly an hour as they battled to get him free. He died the day after.
His step-daughter Samantha Bodden told Metro: ‘Keith was a joking man. Always liked to smile and laugh. He loved to eat. He loved kids.
‘He always brought the grandkids gifts or took them to the park. He loved to ride his bike and just be around good vibes.’
In a GoFundMe launched by the family she claimed that the technician forgot to tell Keith to remove his necklace before entering the room.
She added: ‘My mother is trying hard to be strong. This whole situation is really taking a toll on her. I’m just praying for her strength.’
His wife Adrienne has spoken about the loss of her husband. She recalled: ‘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.’
‘I said, “Could you turn off the machine, call 911, do something, Turn this damn thing off!”’ She added, as tears ran down her face.
She said the technician helped her try to pull her husband off the machine, but it was impossible.
‘He waved goodbye to me and then his whole body went limp,’ Ms Jones-McAllister told the TV outlet.
She told News 12 that her husband suffered a heart attack after he was freed from the MRI machine.
His stepdaughter said in a statement: ‘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.
‘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 from the machine.’
Criminal activity is not suspected, but an investigation is underway.
Doctors at another North Shore University Hospital close by were shocked by the death and questioned whether safety protocols were followed, particularly around metal objects.
‘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 if the patient was slams against the MRI, you know, any kind of blunt force trauma that we can think about could happen,’ emergency medicine Dr Payal Sud told WABC.
The MRI incident happened three days after a 19-year-old working at a Tina’s Burritos factory in Vernon, California, was cleaning a meat grinder when it activated suddenly and sucked him in.
Other employees tried to turn the industrial food processor off, but to no avail, and the teen died before police officers arrived. Foul play was not suspected.
And two weeks prior to that, a 38-year-old factory worker got trapped in an industrial oven at a cereal plant in Perryville, Missouri.
