At Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, 61‑year‑old Keith McAllister went in for what should have been a routine scan—still wearing the 20‑pound metal chain he used for weight training. His wife, Adrienne Jones‑McAllister, had just finished her own knee MRI and asked the technician to fetch her husband so she could climb down from the table. As Keith stepped into the room, the powerful magnetic field gripped his chain and yanked him forward in an instant.
“I watched him walk toward me and then the machine just snatched him,” Adrienne recounted in tears. “He went limp in my arms.” Although she screamed for the technician to shut the machine off and dial 911, Keith remained pinned against the scanner’s opening by his own weight for nearly an hour while staff struggled to free him. During that time, he suffered a series of heart attacks and, despite resuscitation efforts, later died from his injuries.
Adrienne insists the technician was fully aware of Keith’s chain—she says they had even joked about its size on previous visits—yet he allowed Keith to enter the room still wearing it. Their stepdaughter, Samantha Bodden, echoed her mother’s outrage, blaming the technician on social media and flatly denying reports that Keith had been barred from the MRI suite. “He was invited into the room by that same technician,” she wrote, demanding accountability for her stepfather’s premature death.
A Nassau County Police Department press release confirms that Keith entered the active scanning room with the heavy chain around his neck and was immediately pulled in by its magnetic force. As Adrienne watched helplessly, staff attempted to remove him but could not release the chain. By the time emergency responders arrived, Keith had already endured critical trauma.
Now, amid grief and disbelief, Adrienne and Samantha are calling for a full investigation into the tragic oversight that turned a standard medical procedure into a fatal accident.