Wife screamed five devastating words as husband sucked into MRI machine

A grieving widow recalled the moment she watched in horror as her husband was sucked into an MRI machine in New York.

Keith McAllister, 61, was critically injured when he was pulled into the machine by his necklace at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, Long Island, in July. He died from his injuries, Nassau County police confirmed.

His wife Adrienne Jones-McAllister spoke about the devastating incident, revealing she had undergone an an MRI on her knee and needed help getting up, so she asked if her husband could be sent in to help her. It comes after a man claims 'I died for seven minutes in hospital - here's exactly what I saw on the other side'.

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When undergoing an MRI scan, patients and all other people in the room are asked to remove all jewellery and piercings because the machine generates strong magnetic fields.

However, Ms Jones-McAllister said her husband was allowed her husband to enter the room even though he was wearing a 20-pound weight-training chain. Sharing her horrifying account of the incident, she told News 12 Long Island that she saw her husband walk toward the table and the machine "snatch him" immediately.

When he got close to her, she said, "at that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in and he hit the MRI."

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As tears ran down her face, she recalled: "I said: 'Could you turn off the machine, call 911, do something." Revealing the five words she screamed were, 'Turn this damn thing off!', she added: "He went limp in my arms, and this is still pulsating in my brain."

The heartbroken woman 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," she told the TV outlet. Her husband suffered several heart attacks after being freed from the machine and later died.

Ms Jones-McAllister claimed it wasn't the first time she and her husband had been at Nassau Open MRI, and said he had worn his chain there before. "That was not the first time that guy has seen that chain," she said. "They had a conversation about it before."

In the wake of Mr McAllister's death, his daughter Samantha Bodden shared further details about the tragedy.

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In the GoFundMe page set up to support the family with burial costs, she wrote: "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."

She then clarified: "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."

Paying tribute to her dad, Samantha added: "Keith was a husband, a father, a stepfather, a grandfather, a brother, and an uncle. He was a friend to many. He was on a fixed income from social security and didn't have much. So at this time, my mother is asking for help with expenses to help bury him."

MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is a non-invasive medical imaging technique that uses powerful magnets and radio waves to produce detailed images of the body's internal structures. The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering warns that the magnetic field generated by an MRI is strong enough to pull ferromagnetic objects with deadly force.

"Very powerful forces are exerted on objects made of iron, some steels, and other magnetic materials," it says, noting the field can be "strong enough to fling a wheelchair across the room".

MRI-related accidents are rare but can prove fatal when they do occur and this is not the first such incident in New York. In 2001, six-year-old Michael Colombini was killed at the Westchester Medical Centre when an oxygen tank was pulled into an MRI chamber by the machine's 10-ton electromagnet.