Joe Yates
A woman has detailed the moment her husband was 'snatched' by an MRI machine, resulting in his death.
Kevin McAllister tragically passed away on Friday (July 18), two days after being pulled toward the MRI machine - which stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging - at the Nassau Open MRI, in Westbury, Long Island, New York.
The 61-year-old was there to show support for his wife Adrienne Jones-McAllister, who had an MRI scan on her knee at the clinic, and he reportedly asked staff whether he could come and help her up.
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However, it is understood that the New Yorker was donning a 20-pound chain necklace - believed to be for weight training purposes - when the magnetic force from the machine dragged him in.
"He went limp in my arms," Adrienne recalled to News 12 Long Island. "And this is still pulsating in my brain."
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!’”
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While Nassau County Police Department confirmed 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."
As for how and why Kevin was killed in the freak MRI accident, it's due to the strong magnetic field in the machine.
Videos online detail why it can be fatal, with one in particular showing just how difficult it is to remove a metal chair that was tossed in to show the dangers of taking metal into the room. Have a look:
While it's extremely difficult to remove metal from the machine's magnetic field, induced currents in metallic objects can also lead to soft tissue burns as they heat up.
Due to these reasons, patients are thoroughly checked to make sure they don't have any metal on them, or inside their bodies, prior to entering the room.
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News 12 spoke to staff at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York - which is not affiliated with Nassau Open MRI - about the safety protocols they have in place for MRIs.
Staff member Charles Winterfledt, holding a large metal detector, told the news broadcaster: "You turn this on. You screen the patient. You make sure there's no metal on the body prior to coming into zone three or zone four."
Zone four is inside the magnetic field of the MRI.
He continued: "If I brought a portable oxygen tank in there, it would act like a torpedo and just go into the room and you would not be able to move it."
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Adrienne explained that it wasn't the first time she had visited Nassau Open MRI with her husband, and claims that an employee had mentioned just how large his chain was prior to the horrific accident.
“They had a conversation about it before: 'Oh that’s a big chain'," she alleged.
Speaking of the moment Kevin entered the room, Adrienne continued: "In that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in, and he hit the MRI."
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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 the machine, but they couldn’t set him free.
According to the NCPD, an investigation is underway.
UNILAD has contacted Nassau Open MRI for comment.