The grieving wife of a Long Island man who tragically died after being violently pulled into an MRI machine is pointing the finger at the imaging technician, holding them responsible for his fatal injuries.
Keith McAllister, 61, suffered catastrophic trauma Wednesday afternoon at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury when a heavy metal chain he was wearing was suddenly yanked by the machine’s powerful magnet, dragging him into the scanner.
Despite efforts to save him, McAllister’s injuries proved fatal, Nassau County police confirmed.
His wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, had just completed an MRI on her knee when she asked a technician to call her husband over to help her off the table. Moments later, Keith, still wearing a 20-pound metal chain he used for weight training, approached—and in a terrifying instant, the machine’s magnetic force snatched him inside.
“I watched him walk toward the table, and then the machine just grabbed him,” Adrienne recalled in anguish to News 12 Long Island.
“He went limp in my arms — and that image still haunts me every moment,” Adrienne Jones-McAllister tearfully recalled.
Despite the heavy metal chain clearly visible and worn during previous visits to the same facility, the technician allowed her husband to enter the MRI room.
“That wasn’t the first time that technician had seen the chain. They’d even talked about it before,” she said, her voice trembling.
Following the horrific incident, Keith McAllister suffered multiple heart attacks and ultimately succumbed to his injuries.
His stepdaughter, Samantha Bodden, echoed her mother’s grief and directly blamed the technician for the tragic loss.
“While my mother was lying on the table, the technician left the room to bring my stepfather in to help her off — but he completely forgot to tell him to remove the chain around his neck before the magnet pulled him in,” Samantha wrote on Facebook Friday.
She also strongly disputed reports from several news outlets claiming McAllister was not authorized to be in the room.
“Some stations said he wasn’t allowed in there, but that’s false — the technician himself brought him inside,” she added on a GoFundMe page set up to assist with burial expenses.
The Nassau County Police Department confirmed in a statement that McAllister entered the MRI room during an active scan and was violently drawn in by the machine’s powerful magnetic force acting on the metal chain around his neck.
Adrienne told News 12 that after asking the technician to get her husband, she desperately called out to him — but it was too late.
She insisted that despite the bulky chain around his neck—something they had even joked about during a previous visit—the technician still called him into the room, playfully saying, “Ooooooh, that’s a big chain!”
But as he approached her, everything turned terrifying in an instant. She recalled, “The machine suddenly grabbed him, spun him around, and yanked him right into the MRI.”
“I begged, ‘Turn off the machine, call 911, do something—just shut this damn thing off!’” she recalled through tears streaming down her face. “He went completely limp in my arms.”
The technician tried desperately to free McAllister from the machine but was unable to do so, she said.
“My mother and the technician struggled for several agonizing minutes to release him before the police were called. He was trapped—attached to that machine—for nearly an hour before they finally managed to free the chain,” Bodden shared somberly in her heartfelt Facebook post.