WESTBURY, N.Y. — A man who was pulled into an MRI machine in New York after he walked into the room wearing a large chain necklace has died, according to police and his wife, who told a local television outlet that he waved goodbye before his body went limp.
The man, 61, had entered an MRI room while a scan was underway Wednesday afternoon at Nassau Open MRI. The machine’s strong magnetic force drew him in by his metallic necklace, according to a release from the Nassau County Police Department.
He died Thursday afternoon, but a police officer who answered the phone at the Nassau County police precinct where the MRI facility is located said the department had not been given permission to release the name Saturday.
Adrienne Jones-McAllister told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband, Keith McAllister, to help her get off the table.
When he got close to her, she said, “at that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in and he hit the MRI.”
“I said: ‘Could you turn off the machine, call 911, do something, Turn this damn thing off!’” she recalled, as tears ran down her face. “He went limp in my arms.”
She told News 12 that the technician summoned into the room her husband, who 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.
“He waved goodbye to me and then his whole body went limp,” Jones-McAllister told the TV outlet.
A person who answered the phone at Nassau Open MRI on Long Island declined to comment Friday. The phone number went unanswered on Saturday.
It wasn’t the first New York death to result from an MRI machine.
In 2001, 6-year-old Michael Colombini of Croton-on-Hudson was killed at the Westchester Medical Center when an oxygen tank flew into the chamber, drawn in by the MRI’s 10-ton electromagnet.
In 2010, records filed in Westchester County revealed that the family settled a lawsuit for $2.9 million.
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.”