Man dies after neck chain pulls him into MRI machineStaff WritersAPSun, 20 July 2025 1:36PM
A man who was pulled into an MRI machine in New York while wearing a large weight-training chain around his neck has died, with his wife revealing he waved goodbye before his body went limp.
The 61-year-old man entered an MRI room while a scan was underway on Wednesday afternoon at Nassau Open MRI.
The machine’s strong magnetic force drew him in by the metallic chain around his neck, according to a release from the Nassau County Police Department.
He died on 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 yet been given permission to release his name.
Adrienne Jones-McAllister told News 12 Long Island 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.
She told News 12 the technician summoned her husband, who was wearing a nine kilo chain that he uses for weight training, an object they’d had a casual conversation about during a previous visit with comments like: “Ooooooh, that’s a big chain!”
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.”
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,” Jones-McAllister said.
He suffered heart attacks after he was freed from the MRI machine, she said.
MRI machines “employ a strong magnetic field” that “exerts very powerful forces on objects of iron, some steels, and other magnetisable 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”.
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