Finally! After an hour of trying to extract him from being trapped in the MRI, they’re able to get him out and rush him to the hospital. In the next 24-hours, however, the stakes of this accident are going to be raised, significantly. In this episode of the Invisible Force we’ll learn about the day following the accident, setting the stage for the next part of this story.
Everyone at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury or Long Island, NY, may have been breathing a sigh of relief that they’d finally removed the man who was being choked by a steel chain in their MRI scanner, but the MRI accident victim, Mr. Keith McAllister, was fighting for his life at the University Hospital.
The MRI safety community was abuzz, and rumors about this MRI accident were flying. Sadly, it was only the next day when we learned that he died as a result of the horrific fatal MRI accident with the chain around his neck.
Show Notes:
FDA MAUDE Report of Fatal MRI Accident From Siemens
Nassau County Police Blotter
Lonestar 9-1-1 – TV Show MRI Scene
Leaked Security Camera Footage
Transcript:
“He went limp in my arms. I just can’t believe. I just, I still can’t wrap my head around the whole thing. He wave goodbye to me. And then his whole body went limp.”
Hello, and welcome back to the Invisible Force Podcast. This podcast series is built around exploring MRI incidents and accidents that often get described incorrectly in your local news or in online stories as being freak accidents.
Our entire first season is dedicated to an accident you likely heard about in the news, a man who died in a horrific MRI accident out on Long Island, New York, just a few months ago in July of 2025.
Before we pick up our story from the prior episode, however, this is a great time to reintroduce you to our co-hosts for the podcast.
I’m John Posh, an MRI technologist, MRI educator, MRI safety auditor, and longtime advocate for MRI safety practices.
And I’m Toby Gilk, certified MR safety officer, MRI safety expert, and architect by training and safety consultant by choice, and author of a new MRI safety textbook, The Technologist’s MRI Safety Handbook.
From our last episode, you’ll remember that we described the extraordinary steps that were taken to quench the MRI scanner, killing its magnetic field, in order to rescue Mr. Keith McAllister. Then they stabilized him, loaded him into an ambulance, and took him away to the university hospital that was about three miles away. This was early in the evening of Wednesday, July 16th.
This episode focuses on the information that was immediately available to the public about the accident, and the results that dramatically raised the stakes for all the involved parties.
The very first piece of public information about this accident was the aided report released by the Nassau County Police Department on their website. According to detectives, officers responded to a 911 call for an aided at the Nassau Open MRI located at 1570 Old Country Road. Upon arrival, officers were informed that a male, age 61, entered an unauthorized magnetic resonance imaging room while the scan was in progress. 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. The Nassau County Police Department responded to assist the aided where he was transported to a local area hospital. He is listed in critical condition.
Initially, a lot was made of the statement from the police that indicated that Mr. McAllister was unauthorized. That aspect made a lot of news stories.
He apparently walked into an unauthorized area at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury while a scan was underway. Now, Nassau County Police say a man walked in to assist the patient getting out of the MRI against the discretion of the tech.
First, officers were informed that he was unauthorized. Prompts us to ask, informed by who? Once you realize that this statement could reflect the perspectives of a person who has an interest in how you and I, potentially a jury of their peers, understands this accident, it becomes a pretty important question to try and get an answer, informed by who? Who said he was unauthorized?
Let’s talk a little bit more about what unauthorized in MRI often means and how this might be some spin on the part of the imaging center to diminish the perception of their responsibility.
If we jump into the way back machine and travel all the way back to 2001, just a handful of weeks before the September 11th attacks, there was another horrible, fatal MRI accident, this one at Westchester Medical Center outside of New York City. In that accident, a six-year-old boy named Michael Colombini was killed when the wrong type of oxygen tank was brought into the MRI room where he was positioned to waiting his MRI scan. For a short while, this story was all over the news, but lost all popular interest after September 11th.
The lasting impact of that Colombini accident can be found in an MRI safety document titled The White Paper on MRI Safety, published that year by the American College of Radiology, the ACR. That document has been updated almost a half-dozen times since then, changing its name and expanding the content over more than 20 years.
One of the most iconic takeaways from those ACR publications is what’s called the Four Zone Model. Said simply, it’s an idea that MRIs have real risks, and the closer you get to the MRI machine, the more screening and supervision you should have. If you follow the ACR Four Zone Model, nobody, nobody should be in the room just prior to the MRI scanner, what we call Zone 3, without having gone through two separate forms of screening. A clinical screening to make sure that you don’t have any implants or medical devices or leftover bits of shrapnel or projectiles that could be negatively affected by the MRI. And then we add a physical screening to make sure that the person isn’t wearing or carrying anything that the MRI scanner would want to grab and pull, or medical devices that they would want to disrupt. And there should be a locked door between where the unscreened people, so zone two in the four zone model, and areas before the MRI scanner room, zone three. So we want to separate the unscreened individuals from the screened areas, and we want to separate that with a locked door.
If you’ve seen the one minute security camera footage of the incident, it clearly shows Mr. McAllister walking from the MRI control room, zone three, into the MRI scan room. If the site was following the ACR four zone model, the only way Mr. McAllister should have been able to get there would be if he had previously been screened, verbally, visually, and physically. And if he’d been kept outside of the control room area, then he should have been on the other side of a locked door, so that he could not let himself into zone four.
For a site that follows the ACR four zone model, there are two things that should have been true that would have prevented this accident. Number one, anyone in the control room area would have to be checked and verified, so that they were safe to go into the MRI scanner room. And number two, anybody who wasn’t successfully screened for MRI safety should have been locked out of the zone three or the control room area.
This leads us to two possible conclusions. Either Mr. McAllister was incorrectly or inappropriately authorized to be in zone three, the control spaces, or he was supposed to be kept outside of that locked door, but somehow let himself in.
In either case, identifying him as unauthorized is an indication that he wasn’t screened, either because the site didn’t follow the ACR standard to screen him, or because he barged into the controlled access areas. Information will later come to light that will suggest that it’s the first one of those.
Beyond the unauthorized label, the other piece of popularly available information was that he was pulled in by a necklace.
“A rare but just terrifying medical episode inside a Long Island MRI center.”
“Police say that a person wearing a metallic necklace was actually pulled off his feet and then drawn into the magnetic testing machine.”
“Now to a terrifying accident at a Long Island MRI facility. A 61-year-old man was critically injured when a metal necklace pulled him into a running MRI machine.”
I mean, it was around his neck, so I guess technically it was a necklace. But without giving the context of the type of chain, it feeds all sort of misconceptions. MRI patients across the country who have seen this mischaracterization become petrified when the technologist was unfazed by the fact that they had forgotten to take off their wedding band. If an MRI could kill a man with a necklace, surely it could still do terrible damage with just a ring or a piercing, right?
So the information, at least the initial information, contained a bunch of half-truths. Sounds like it also contained some spin and a number of misinterpretations in the news coverage. This is what many of the news accounts ran with. And the story was so extraordinary that the mistakes just seemed to feed one another as the coverage spread and spread and spread.
The results were that these mischaracterizations had all sorts of people citing horribly inaccurate information. There was a whole line of social media comments celebrating the accuracy of the Final Destination movie as if it was some Oscar-winning documentary. The information confirmed so many people’s fears.
And as long as we’re acknowledging the social media monster, we’ll return to something that we mentioned in the very first episode in this series, that there was rampant speculation in the stupid side of social media that Mr. McAllister knowingly entered the MRI scanner room with the intent to be able to claim an injury and sue the imaging center. As we said before, but it bears repeating since we’re recapping what was said about this accident, there’s absolutely nothing that supports these contentions.
Similarly, there are people in social media who choose to run into the absurd territory with the unauthorized term, suggesting that Mr. McAllister barged into an area he was otherwise locked out of. Again, these speculations had precisely zero basis in fact.
Not immediately available after the accident, but several weeks later, the one minute clip, the security camera video from Nassau Open MRI, that was leaked. I was actually contacted by a producer from the TV show Inside Edition. They were apparently weighing the decision whether to do a story on this accident using the security camera footage. They were looking for somebody to verify the authenticity of the video. They were apparently not real happy about running it because they couldn’t verify its authenticity. I told them, yes, it’s the real deal, but I can’t tell you how I know. Apparently that wasn’t good enough for them because they never ran that story as far as I know.
But that one-minute clip really shot down a lot of the speculation, and it appears to disprove the notion that Mr. McAllister was not authorized to be in the area, if the calm on-screen body language of the MRI tech is any indication anyway.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a little bit with the leaked video, as well as all the additional information we’ve uncovered since the accident. If we put ourselves back in the timeline, in the last episode we left you with Mr. McAllister being whisked away in an ambulance to Nassau University Medical Center after having been extricated from the MRI scanner. And any of you who know me know that I often have my ear to the ground about MRI accidents. Now, this accident occurred late on a Wednesday afternoon. And Thursday morning, I woke up to a bunch of messages alerting me to the accident. First thing, Thursday morning, I actually put in a call to the corporate offices of Nassau Open MRI. They actually operate a number of MRI centers in the New York City metro area, all managed out of one central corporate office. The receptionist who initially answered the phone didn’t know that the accident had happened. But with a little pushing, she ultimately transferred me to somebody that she identified as the regional manager. And unfortunately, I didn’t write down his name. I repeated to him the accident details that had been shared with me, that this was actually being aired on local Long Island TV news stations. And he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised with what I was telling him. And ultimately, he got off the phone saying, I’ll have to get back to you. To date, nobody from Nassau Open MRI has called me back, although I have left several additional messages for them.
Yes. Effective communication is often hampered in these incidents. So that was Thursday morning. All we knew at this point was that Mr. McAllister had been taken to the hospital the previous evening and was in critical condition. But his stay in the hospital wasn’t long. That Thursday afternoon, it was announced that Mr. McAllister died in the hospital, the death attributed to multiple heart attacks.
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Let’s start with what it means that Mr. McAllister died of multiple heart attacks because social media commenters again made statements like, well, he must have had underlying health problems or so he didn’t really die from the MRI accident, as if the heart attack really couldn’t be related to getting dragged by the neck and choked inside of an MRI for nearly an hour.
Yeah, it’s kind of a cause and effect discussion. The MRI attracting the chain didn’t in fact damage his heart. What it did was it cut off the blood supply to his brain, which then caused organs to start to fail because they were lacking oxygen. The brain was not able to tell the rest of the body what to do. So, while he died of a heart attack, the heart attack was facilitated by essentially multiple mechanisms of strangulation, either through cutting off the air flow to his brain, the blood flow to his brain, or a combination of both more likely.
And while it might seem glaringly obvious, the fact that Mr. McAllister died dramatically changes what happens next. As just one example, MRIs are nationally regulated medical devices, and when somebody dies involving a regulated medical device, the health care provider, in this case, Nassau Open MRI, has an obligation to report the incident directly to the US. FDA. Now just a few days ago, I checked the FDA’s MAUDE database, which is an online tool. You can search implant device, medical device interactions, reactions or problems. Well, I searched that database a few days ago, and while there is a report about this accident from Siemens, the manufacturer of the MRI machine, there was not a report from Nassau Open MRI.
Another of the effects of Mr. McAllister’s death is that it dramatically shifts the complexion of any potential lawsuits. For starters, the fact that Mr. McAllister died immediately means that the immediate medical expenses weren’t astronomical, and there was no ongoing care expenses for the family. Now, that’s not to say that this in any way discounts the seriousness of what’s going on and what happened, but without huge incurred health care costs or the need for ongoing expensive care, it does remove a bit of the urgency to come to a resolution. And this is going to be important as we move into the next part of the series.
In the days after Mr. McAllister’s death, Nassau Open MRI took down their website completely, though there are parts that have been preserved in the Internet Archive or the Wayback Machine. You can Google it if you want to. It’s as if they were trying to erase anything associated with their name. We’ve heard from various sources that the company’s insurance carrier said that they weren’t going to continue to provide the company insurance at least not until the potential liabilities were addressed. Now, we don’t know if that was specific to the Long Island location or for all of the Nassau Open MRI locations that the company owned throughout the New York City metro area. Only just recently, I have heard that, and this is unsubstantiated, that the company is essentially shuttering the location where this happened with no intentions to reopen it again.
None of the news coverage identified any of the individuals with Nassau Open MRI. Not a corporate spokesperson, not the site’s manager, not even the MRI technologists that we see in the subsequently leaked security camera video. From the news coverage, we’d be left with the notion that there weren’t any real live human beings involved apart from Mr. and Mrs. McAllister.
Another thing that, in retrospect, is missing from the news coverage is anything having to do with MRI safety regulations or licensure or accreditation. I think many of us know that radiology, because many of the imaging devices we use represent real risks to health and safety of our patients and sometimes to members of the public, radiology is often the subject of lots of rules and regulations. How come we never heard about inspections from accreditation organizations or how come we never saw news footage with investigators wearing New York State Department of Health or US FDA raid jackets running into the building? MRIs are federally regulated devices and states have specific obligations to make sure federal standards are being met. But why wasn’t there a single mention of any of these investigations in the news? Were they done, but just on the down low?
We’ll remind you of what some of the nearby Long Island residents said immediately after the accident.
“That’s insane. That should never happen.”
“You know, it has to be someone’s responsibility. I think that they should have had better precautions, like how that even happened, how to even get to that point. That really made me upset because that should never happen.”
We agree, this should never have happened. And through this episode, episode four, we’ve only told you that it did not the how or the why, but we’re going to get to that.
This episode really marks the conclusion of what we call Act One of this arc of the Invisible Force podcast, identifying for you what we understand happened during the roughly 24 hours between Mrs. Jones McAllister being taken by her husband for her knee MRI and Mr. McAllister being pronounced dead at the hospital the next day. Mostly, this episode and the previous three have been about what we knew in the moment, with a little bit of information filled in from what we learned later. But starting in the next episode, we’re going to start taking you into the aftermath, the weeks and months after the accident.
In Act Two, the next several episodes, we’re going to get into the various lawyers, lawsuits, the investigations by the Nassau County Police Department’s Homicide Squad, the MRI safety standards from the Feds and the federally deputized accreditation organizations, as well as the state of New York Department of Health. We’ll talk about the Leet Security camera video and where we think it came from. With the help of others in the industry, we’ll also have a surprise guest appearance giving a name and a face to Nassau Open MRI for the very first time.
In other words, all we’ve covered so far is what happened on that day. In the next several episodes, we’ll be sharing with you what happened next and ultimately what changed as a result to help make you and me and everyone who might ever need to get an MRI a little bit safer.
He went limp in my arms. I just can’t believe. I still can’t wrap my head around the whole thing. He waved goodbye to me and then his whole body went limp.
Next episode, we’re going to pick up the story from the immediate aftermath of the accident and Keith McAllister’s death and we’re going to start looking at some of the agencies and organizations that perhaps should have prevented this in the first place. So make sure you’re subscribed to the Invisible Force podcast to get the next episode as soon as it drops.
For this week’s show, our sources were multiple news accounts of the accident, including Fox 5 and CBS New York and WPLG Local 10 and ABC Network News coverage. They also include details from the Family’s GoFundMe page, the Nassau County Police Department’s website, the US FDA MAUDE database, as well as several confidential listener sources, folks just like you.
Our intro audio was excerpted from an interview that Mrs. Adrienne Jones-McAlister gave to Long Island News Channel 12.
If you have any information about this incident or the people involved, or details we’ve been asking about, please reach out to us through our website, invisibleforcepodcast.com. You can find episodes and show notes and a tip line contact page there on the website.
Also, you can leave us a voicemail with information about this incident at area code 631-MRI-tips. That number again is 631-MRI-tips, or 631-674-8477.
Lastly, we’d like to ask you to make sure to share our podcast with your friends and colleagues. With your help, we’ll unravel the mystery of what happened. And as we go forward with this story, with just a little bit of luck and a little bit of help from our listeners, we can help make sure that accidents like this don’t ever occur again.
