Join us for this brand new podcast series exploring a fatal MRI accident that occurred in 2025. This first episode drops you straight into the story of a tragic (and preventable) MRI death of a man named Keith McAllister, prompting questions of ‘how could this have happened?’ and ‘could this happen again?’

This series is dedicated to promoting MRI safety for patients, healthcare workers, as well as visitors. By “peeling back” the superficial coverage to get deep into what happened, we’ll be exposing where MRI safe practices break down, and how expected and preventable MRI accidents happen.

Our entire first series centers around the horrible MRI accident that happened on Long Island, New York, at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, NY, when a man who was trying to help his wife off of the MRI scanner table got pulled into the MRI scanner by a chain around his neck. The series dives deep into what happened, and who has responsibility to keep each of us safe if we ever need to have an MRI scan.

Show Notes:
Practical fMRI YouTube Video on MRI Attractive force
Nassau County Police Blotter
Long Island 12 News Interview
Leaked Security Camera Footage

Transcript:
July 16th, 2025 at 1634 and 17 seconds. 

“Nassau County 911, what’s your emergency?”

“Oh my god, there’s a man trapped in our MRI scanner with a chain around his neck. We’re trying, but we can’t get him out, and I think he’s being choked.”

“Please send paramedics, hurry!”

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

Hello and welcome to the very first episode of the Invisible Force Podcast. This podcast series is built around exploring MRI incidents and accidents that, when they occur, often get described in your local news or in the online stories as, quote, freak accidents. 

We’re gonna tell you stories of these accidents and help you understand how that label, that freak accident characterization, is almost never true. Today, we understand virtually all of the ways that MRI accidents can happen. And even more importantly, we understand how they can be prevented if only we choose to do so. 

Come with us as we investigate what happened, why it happened, and what might have been done to keep it from happening. Our entire first season is dedicated to an accident you might have heard about in the news. A man who died in an MRI accident out on Long Island, New York, just a few months ago in July of 2025. 

But before we get into that story, this is a great time to introduce you to the Season 1 co-hosts for the podcast.

I’m John Posh, MRI technologist, MRI educator, MRI safety auditor, and long-time advocate of MRI safety practices.

And I’m Tobias, or Toby, Gilk. I’m an architect by training, and I actually got into MRI safety through the architecture, the physical environment piece of this. I was fortunate enough to be invited to serve on the ACR, the American College of Radiology’s MRI Safety Committee. And that really sort of launched my MRI safety career, if you will. I’ve done many other things in the MRI safety space, and most recently, I’m a co-author of a new MRI safety textbook, the Technologist’s MRI Safety Handbook. 

Now, throughout this season of the Invisible Force podcast, we’re going to recreate for you the events as best we understand them. At the end of each podcast, we’re gonna share with you all the sources that we can. While we’re telling this as a story, we need you to know that everything we’re sharing with you is as verified and as substantiated as we’re able to get it. Most of the time, we’re able to share some information about our sources, but know that we have some confidential sources. Some people in sensitive positions who would get in trouble for sharing the valuable information that they have shared with us. We’re gonna be very careful not to give any indication of who those people are and what roles they’re sitting in.

You should also know that we’re beginning this podcast without knowing how the story will end. This event is so recent, the lawyers have been hired, and they’re shushing everyone involved. So while we’re still digging, getting details, corroborating information, we’re also asking for your help. Whatever you may know about this event that isn’t already in the news articles, we’re inviting you to visit our website, invisibleforcepodcast.com, go to our tips and contact page, and help us with your details about how this event unfolded, or what’s being done to help make sure it doesn’t happen again in New York.

So let’s start with the story. At the outset of this episode, you heard our little radio play of what we think the 911 call must have sounded like. But let’s start at the very beginning of this story. What a very good place to start.

We’d like to introduce you to Ms. Adrienne Jones McAllister. Ms. Jones McAllister is an older woman, the news accounts having given her age. And she had a very painful knee that was needing a walker to get around. She was sent for an MRI of her knee to try and figure out why she was having so much pain.

Her 61-year-old husband, Mr. Keith McAllister, brought her to her MRI appointment on July 16th, coincidentally just a week before MRI Safety Week, which was created in honor of a different fatal MRI accident that occurred in New York about 24 years previous.

The Imaging Center for our contemporary story was identified in police reports and local news reports as being Nassau Open MRI.

Now, MRIs are often portrayed as the safe imaging option because they don’t expose the patient to any ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation is the type of radiation that can, in rare instances, trigger later developments of cancer. MRIs, instead, use a combination of pulsed and always-on magnetism to generate the images that radiologists use to diagnose injury or disease. But even though MRIs don’t use ionizing radiation, there are actually a number of ways that they can injure MRI patients or healthcare workers, or, as we’re about to learn, even visitors to the MRI suite.

Now, because there are risks associated with MRI scanners, it’s standard practice in many places that anyone who isn’t the MRI patient or a healthcare worker remain outside of a locked door that separates the MRI room from the rest of the hospital or imaging center. One of the first things to know about this incident is that this imaging center didn’t do that, at least not in this case. Mr. McAllister was waiting in an area adjacent to the control room where the operator would run the scanner from. Essentially, he was sitting next to the technologist.

Now, this particular MRI scanner setup was a bit odd. Many smaller or rural hospitals will have an MRI in a semi-trailer, come and visit them for a day or two, every week or two. They’ll park next in the hospital, they’ll scan patients there, and then they’ll drive on to the next hospital where they’ll do the same thing again. Now, this imaging center also had an MRI in a trailer, but that trailer didn’t go anywhere else. It was essentially permanently parked at the imaging center. In fact, they had built an extension from the building, almost like a jet bridge that connects the airport to the airplane. They had done this so that patients never had to go outside to get from the imaging center building to the MRI scanner.

The interesting thing about these mobile MRIs as they’re termed, is that they are in fact trailers that have to comply with the laws for trucks, and trailers that actually drive on the highway. As such, they tend to be much narrower than the rooms that are built in hospitals or imaging centers for MRI scanners. So right off the start here, we’re starting with very cramped quarters. In fact, the width of the MRI room was just only wide enough to fit the MRI scanner wall to wall with no space to go around it to the backside on either side. Even if you’d wanted to, you couldn’t get behind there. Everything inside the trailer was cramped and close. Every point is just a few steps from everywhere else inside this trailer.

So reportedly, Mrs. Jones McAllister was in a fair bit of pain. Now, when you have an MRI of your knee, they lay you down on your back on a table that sticks out from the donut-shaped part of the scanner, and then the table slides you feet first into the MRI. Mostly for knee scans, your chest and head won’t even slide into the donut part of the MRI scanner, but you will typically have to lie still there, usually pretty uncomfortably for 15 to 20 minutes for the MRI scan, depending on the scanner, staring at the ceiling and being bored out of your mind. There are different accounts, some of which say she finished the knee MRI and others that say that she was in so much pain that she couldn’t hold still for the time needed. Either way, the technologist who was running the MRI scan came into the room and tapped a couple of buttons on the front of the MRI scanner that automatically slid the table out from inside the donut. In a televised interview with Long Island News Channel 12, Mrs. Jones McAllister said that then she called out to her husband to help get her up off of the MRI table.

Now, because Mr. McAllister was right inside the MRI trailer and not locked outside of it as standard practice would mandate, in responding to his wife’s call for help, he walked straight into the MRI scanner room. There, he saw that his wife needed help sitting up on the table. He tucked his cell phone into his pocket to free up both hands. She reached out to him and he grabbed both of her hands in his to pull her into a seated position. Remember, she was facing the scanner, so he had to stand with his back towards the scanner. As he helped her sit up, he took a step backwards towards the MRI scanner.

Now, this is probably a good time to interrupt the story to tell you, if you haven’t previously had an MRI, everyone and everything that enters the MRI room is supposed to be checked, because MRI scanners depend on crazy, powerful and always on magnetic fields. There’s an amazing YouTube video by a user called Practical FMRI, where they measure just how much force a metal object, as small as a wrench and as big as an office chair, how much force those objects can exert when they’re grabbed by the pull of an MRI scanner. Almost every MRI scanner room door is going to have warning signage all over it that’s going to list out or illustrate objects that could be huge risks if they were brought into the room. Now, unlike what you’ve probably seen on TV shows and movies, MRI magnetic fields generally aren’t likely to cause things to go flying from the far side of the room. But when you get close enough, well, let’s just say you don’t want to be in a tug of war with an MRI scanner because you’re not going to win.

Because of this risk, there are categories of products that are designed and tested to be safe for use in the MRI rooms. In other words, some metal objects may be okay in MRI rooms. Others can turn into missiles. In fact, this effect is often described in MRI circles as the missile effect.

Now, as we come back to our story, Mr. McAllister has entered the room to help his wife sit up and get off the MRI table. Now, while she was laying down, she reached out her hands to him. He reached out to her and helped pull her up into a seated position. And in doing that, he took that half step backwards, and that half step got him too close to the MRI scanner. And this is where things go horribly wrong. 

The season one sponsor of the Invisible Force podcast is cairereporting.org. That’s spelled C-A-I-R-E. cairereporting.org is a confidential MRI adverse incident reporting system available to you, the public, as well as offering enterprise solutions to hospitals and imaging centers for secure confidential reporting of MRI accidents, incidents and near misses. If you have direct knowledge of MRI accidents that may have been swept under the rug, or if you want information on how CAIRE could be set up as a private internal error reporting tool for your hospital or imaging center, cairereporting.org can help you with both of those. CAIRE has an assembled panel of international experts in MRI safety and accidents. Reports submitted either through the public website or through an enterprise system get reviewed by our experts who deliver insights into the contributing causes of how accidents or near misses happened and, more importantly, steps that could prevent similar accidents in the future. For more information, please visit cairereporting.org. Again, that’s CAIRE spelled C-A-I-R-E. 

Remember that Mr. McAllister was holding his wife’s hands, helping her sit up to get up off of the MRI table. And as he pulled her up, he took that half step backwards, and that half step turned out to be the difference, literally, between life and death.

If you heard or read any of the early reports of this incident, many reporters described Mr. McAllister being pulled into the MRI by his necklace. While that’s technically correct, I think it would leave most of us with an inaccurate sense of just what happened.

Mr. McAllister was reportedly big into physical fitness. In fact, that day, he was wearing a heavy-duty, 20-pound industrial steel chain kind of hidden in a fabric sleeve, the kind that you might use to lock up a scooter or a motorcycle. He had this around his neck for weight training. That chain had what looked like a New York lock type padlock. It was kind of hanging like a pendant that closed the ends of the chain in front of him. Had he been screened right before he walked himself into the MRI scanner room, that really ought to have been removed from him. But he wasn’t screened then, and he came into the room to help his wife up while wearing 20 pounds of steel around his neck.

Now remember, we said the MRI won’t attract things from across the room. But if you take something metal that’s not supposed to be in the room, and you get it close enough to the MRI scanner, that’s a problem. When he took that half step closer to the MRI scanner, as he was helping his wife into a seated position, it was just close enough that the MRI scanner’s magnetic field grabbed hold of the chain or the lock or both, and pulled it with enormous force into the tube of the MRI scanner. From the leaked security camera footage, you can see Mr. McAllister pulled violently by the neck, head first into this tube, the opening of the MRI.

Now, very few people have experience with just how powerful a magnetic attraction force can be from an MRI. It’s not uncommon that people think that the attractive force is going to be in the neighborhood of however much the object weighs. The sad fact, sad for Keith McAllister at least, is that the magnetic pull on a magnetizable object like a steel chain is likely to be much, much more powerful than the weight of the object alone would suggest.

If you get a chance to watch the practical fMRI YouTube video we mentioned in the first half of this episode, you’ll see that the measure of the attractive force from the MRI acting on a little 2-pound steel wrench was about 500 pounds of pull. Now, you gotta figure that a 20-pound chain would have quite a bit more attractive force. But even for argument’s sake, if it was only twice the pull of the wrench, that’s a thousand pounds of force. That’s roughly the equivalent to the weight of a grand piano or a motorcycle around your neck. We actually had to Google and look up what things weigh a thousand pounds for reference for this.

The leaked security camera footage that we talked about before, it doesn’t have audio, but it seems pretty clear that Mrs. Jones McAllister, who’s sitting up on the table with her husband’s bottom half sort of flailing and kicking outside the opening of the bore of the MRI, she’s clearly very upset. The MRI technologist who had been in the tiny MRI scanner room with her but was on the opposite side of the table from where Mr. McAllister was, the tech is reaching into the tube in what appears to be an effort to try and pull the chain off of Mr. McAllister’s neck. But if our guesses about how much force that chain was exerting are anywhere close to accurate, there’s just no way that that MRI technologist could have pulled that off of his neck, off of his throat. Mrs. Jones McAllister is sitting up in the video and she grabs her husband’s belt and she’s trying to pull him out of the bore opening while the tech is reaching in, presumably trying to pull the chain from around his neck.

The leaked video segment is just over a minute long, and we only see Mr. McAllister being yanked in by the chain around his neck. Then roughly the first 40 seconds of the attempts of the MRI technologist and Mrs. Jones McAllister to pull him out. But we know that these two weren’t able to get him out. I can’t even begin to imagine what she was feeling at this point in time.

It’s worth pausing to discuss just a couple of points that cropped up in some early discussions about the incident. Some people commented on the accident. They had suggested, without evidence, I should add, that this wasn’t an accident at all, that Mr. McAllister had intentionally put himself in harm’s way, either in some kind of effort to shake down the imaging center from a personal injury claim or just because he intended to self-harm. Not only is there zero evidence to support these insulting assertions, the leaked security camera video pretty clearly shows that Mr. McAllister’s focus was exclusively on his wife.

Secondly, at this stage of AI and deepfake videos, there’s been suggestion that the leaked video of the accident isn’t legitimate, but instead someone’s idea of what happened. Now, we can’t share with you how we verified the video, but we’re extremely confident that it is in fact real. In fact, before the imaging center took down their website, they used to have a downloadable patient form, which included a video surveillance policy, which said video surveillance systems are in use throughout the property, including but not limited to the waiting room, reception, elevators, hallways, MRI room, x-ray room, and all general common spaces.

So the imaging center said, we’ll be videotaping you, including in the MRI room. And before we got the video, we had received reports that the imaging center turned over the recordings from that day to the police investigating the accident. And then, just a few weeks later, a one-minute clip starts circulating online.

Even if you were inclined to suspect it was fake, there are aspects of exactly how it happened in the video that only someone very familiar with MRI and the physics of magnetic attraction would understand. There’s no way someone who was brilliant at AI videos, but not extremely well-trained in MRI safety and accidents, would be able to make this video showing what the leaked video shows.

Which brings us back to Mr. McAllister being stuck, head first, in the MRI scanner tube, pulled in by the 20-pound chain around his neck. The tech is trying to pull the chain off of him, and Mrs. Jones McAllister was trying to pull him out by his belt. Mrs. Jones McAllister, in the interview that she gave to the local news, talked about her husband going limp in her arms while they were trying to get him out. We don’t know when that happened. It’s not shown in that one-minute video clip, probably, thankfully. John, do you think he lost consciousness, and how long might that have taken?

Well, with an estimated 1,000 pounds of attractive force, the neck is a relatively soft structure. It’s not unthinkable to suspect that his both blood supply and oxygen supply to his brain were cut off, either through compression of his carotid arteries and or the trachea.

Just horrific to even imagine it. Now, somehow word gets from the MRI tech, who’s in that trailer parked outside the back of the building, to other staff at the imaging center, and they call 911, desperate to try and get help to get Mr. McAllister from being strangled by the chain around his neck. Now, in the next episode, we’re gonna pick up from the emergency response, and we’ll talk a little bit about MRI scanners, how they work, as opposed to what TV and movies have told you about how they work. And we’ll tackle the question about how you turn an MRI’s magnetic field off in an emergency like this. Now, we haven’t gotten in to it in this episode, but in future episodes, I’ll be asking you what you would have done, or what you think ought to have been done in this instance. John, I know you and I have talked about this accident a number of times, and we both have strong positions on what should have happened, and I promise you, we will get to that in future episodes.

Yes, we will. As we’re bringing this inaugural episode towards its end, this is probably a good time to let you know what our mission is for the Invisible Force podcast. Yes, we want to share with you what we think are amazing stories you’ll find captivating, but beyond that, we want to raise public awareness of MRI safe practices, and more importantly, identify how groups like the Feds, the States, and the various accrediting organizations can step up to require existing practices to protect you, protect me, protect everyone else seeking care in MRI.

July 16, 2025 at 1634 and 17 seconds. Nassau County 911, what’s your emergency?

Oh my god, there’s a man trapped in our MRI scanner with a chain around his neck. We’re trying, but we can’t get him out, and I think he’s being choked. Please send paramedics, hurry! 

I’m sorry, could you repeat that?

Next episode, we’ll pick up the story from here, and we’ll be talking about the response to that 911 call. So please make sure you’ve subscribed to the Invisible Force podcast to get your next episodes as soon as they drop. 

For this week’s show, our sources were the Nassau County Police blotter, Long Island 12 news interview with Mrs. Jones McAllister, as well as multiple different news accounts of the accident. We also relied on the leaked security camera footage that was shared online as well as a number of confidential sources. 

Our introductory audio play, well, that was voiced by Gwen Langland and Julia Schaffini. 

If you have any information about this incident or the people involved, please reach out to us through the website, invisibleforcepodcast.com. Episodes, show notes, and a tip line contact page are always available there at invisibleforcepodcast.com. 

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 if you prefer the digits, 631-674-8477. 

We would also like to ask you to share our podcast with your friends and colleagues. With your help, we’ll unravel the mystery of what happened and, with a little bit of luck, help make sure that accidents like this don’t occur again.