Wife Grieving Freak Death Of Husband, Pulled Into MRI Machine — And It's Happened Before

HEMPSTEAD, NY — More details are emerging in the freak accident involving an MRI machine that killed a 61-year-old man.

Kevin McAllister was critically injured when he was pulled into the scanner at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury on Wednesday, police said.

McAllister's wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, who was having an MRI performed, asked for her husband to help her get off the table, she told News 12. She said she saw the machine "snatch him," adding that "he waved to goodbye to me, and then his whole body went limp."

The technician brought him into the scanning room even though he was wearing a 20-pound metallic chain around his neck, used for weight training, police said.

The moment he got close to his wife quickly took a tragic turn as, "the machine switched him around, pulled him in, and he hit the MRI," Jones-McAllister told News 12. "That was not the first time that guy has seen that chain. They had a conversation about it before."

She said he suffered multiple heart attacks before dying 24 hours later at an area hospital, News 12 reported.

Patch has attempted to reach Jones-McAllister, who told the news station that the devastation of seeing her husband get sucked into the machine was such a traumatic event.

"I haven't been able to sleep. I'm barely eating," she told News 12. "I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing."

MRI machines “employ a strong magnetic field” that “exerts very powerful forces on objects of iron, some steels, and other magnetizable objects,” according to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, which says the units are “strong enough to fling a wheelchair across the room.”

While such incidents are rare, MRI machines have led to deaths in the past. In 2001, a six-year-old boy died after having an MRI exam at a Westchester County hospital, ABC News reported. In that case, the machine's extremely powerful magnetic field jerked a metal oxygen tank across the room, crushing the child's head.

In 2018, a 32-year-old man was sucked in an MRI machine while visiting a relative at a hospital in Mumbai. The victim was pulled toward the machine by its magnetic force after he entered the room carrying an oxygen cylinder, The Guardian said at the time.

In that case, a doctor and another junior staff member were arrested for causing death due to negligence, Mumbai police said.