The heartbroken wife of a Long Island man who was tragically killed after being pulled into an MRI machine is blaming the imaging technician for his death.
Keith McAllister, 61, was critically injured Wednesday afternoon at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury after being violently drawn into the machine by the metal necklace he was wearing.
He later died from his injuries, according to Nassau County police.
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 20-pound 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.
According to a release from the Nassau County Police Department, McAllister entered the MRI room while a scan was still underway when the machine’s strong magnetic force pulled him in by the metallic chain around his neck.
Jones-McAllister told News 12 that she had called out to her husband after asking the technician to get him.
