The wife of a man who was killed in an MRI accident has spoken out about what happened, and the aftermath.
Adrienne Jones-McAllister was by the side of her husband, 61-year-old Kevin, when the incident occurred at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, N.Y on July 16.
‘He went limp in my arms,’ Jones-McAllister told News 12 Long Island, ‘and this is still pulsating in my brain’.
The harrowing moment took place when Adrienne was undergoing an MRI on her knee at the clinic.
Police later responded to a 911 call at the location just after 4:30 pm local time, where it was described that a man (identified at Kevin) had suffered a ‘medical episode’ after he was caught in the machine, as per the Nassau County Police Department (NCPD)’s news release.
Kevin McAllister was ‘snatched’ by the MRI machine (News 12)
The officers were informed that the man ‘entered an unauthorized Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) room while the scan was in progress,’ the police department said in a statement.
“The male victim was wearing a large metallic chain around his neck causing him to be drawn into the machine which resulted in a medical episode,” police said.
Sadly, two days later, it was reported that he had ‘succumbed to his injuries and was declared deceased by a hospital physician’.
According to his wife, Kevin had suffered several heart attacks after the incident.
She told the outlet she ‘saw the machine snatch him’ and ‘pull him’ in, after he was let into the MRI room.
Recalling the incident, she explained how after her MRI on her knee, she asked the technician to bring her husband to the room to help her get up.
She shared that he was then let into the room, even though he was wearing a 20-lbs chain necklace that he wore for weight training purposes.
“In that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in, and he hit the MRI,” she said.
He was stuck on the machine, which uses extremely powerful magnets to scan the body for ailments and ‘non-bony parts or soft tissue’, as per the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
This is when Adrienne explained that she and the technician tried to pull her husband off of the machine, but they couldn’t set him free.
At the time, she said she was calling for help, stating: “I was saying, ‘Could you turn off the machine? Call 911. Do something. Turn this damn thing off!’”
As per the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, patients are asked to remove metal and electrical objects before an MRI.
However, the wife shared that the MRI on July 16 was not the first time she and her husband had been at Nassau Open MRI.
It allegedly was not the first time that the employee had seen Kevin’s chain, as she claimed: “They had a conversation about it before: ‘Oh that’s a big chain.’”
Since his tragic death, she admitted to suffering with her sleep, stating: “I haven’t been able to sleep, I’m barely eating, I just can’t believe [it].
“I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing. He waved goodbye to me, and his whole body went limp.”
According to the NCPD, an investigation is underway.
