No number of first-responders could have pulled him out of the MRI scanner with that steel chain wrapped around his neck. While Mr. McAllister was being choked, why did it take so long to get him out? And why didn’t they just turn the MRI off? The Invisible Force podcast brings you along as we all discover together.

According to information from the family, Mr. Keith McAllister was inside the MRI scanner at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, NY, for nearly an hour, with the chain pressing against his throat. Police, fire department, and paramedics all rushed to the scene, but they couldn’t get him out of the MRI scanner. Throughout this horrible MRI accident, they were helpless to do more than watch.

The MRI safety measure that should have helped by turning of the magnetic field in an emergency, the MRI quench button, appeared to malfunction. Without it, there was no good option for how to rescue this man who was dying in front of them. Without that button, they were watching a quick rescue turn into a fatal MRI accident.

Show Notes:
Final Destination: Bloodlines – Movie MRI Scene
Practical fMRI YouTube Video on MRI Attractive Force
Nassau County Police Blotter
Lonestar 9-1-1 – TV Show MRI Scene
Leaked Security Camera Footage

Transcript:
“Twice, twice in a row, to the cubs of all teams, it’s embarrassing.”

“I know it, I think- “

“Units be advised, police and EMS responding to reports of a man entrapped in an MRI scanner at 1570 Old Country Road.”

“Did they just say what I think they just said? “

“Yeah, I think they did.”

Hello, and welcome 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 online stories as freak accidents. Our entire first season is dedicated to an accident that 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. Before we pick up our story from the prior episode, this is a great time to reintroduce you to the season one co-hosts for this podcast.

I’m John Posh, MRI technologist, MRI educator, MRI safety accident investigator, and longtime advocate of MRI safety practices.

And I’m Toby Gilk, certified MRI safety officer and certified MRI safety expert, consultant to hospitals and medical device companies on MRI safety, and co-author of the new MRI Safety Textbook for Technologists. 

From our last episode, you’ll remember that Adrienne Jones McAllister had gone into Nassau Open MRI for a knee MRI. After she got pulled out of the MRI tube, she called out to her husband, Mr. Keith McAllister, to help her get up off of the MRI table. Mr. McAllister came in, held her hands, and helped her sit up. In doing that, he moved backwards just a little bit, backing up towards the MRI scanner. And with just a half step, he got close enough to the MRI scanner that the magnetic field grabbed hold of that heavy steel chain and lock that he had around his neck. And it pulled it, and with it, Mr. McAllister still attached, it pulled him head first into the MRI scanner’s tube.

When we left the last episode, the imaging center had just called 911 when they weren’t able to immediately get Mr. McAllister out of the MRI’s tube on their own.

Now, in this episode, we’re going to talk a little bit about the initial emergency response. But before we get there, it’s probably best if we talk a little bit about how MRIs work, including what you’re supposed to do when someone’s getting crushed by a magnetic object that’s attracted to the MRI’s magnetic field.

Interestingly, the movie Final Destination Bloodlines, which came out in May of 2025, just a few months before the Macalester incident, was referenced about a zillion times in all the discussions online about this accident. The movie shows the MRI scanner’s magnetic field turning on, dialing up in strength, until things started getting sucked into the MRI scanner, including one of the characters’ dental fillings, nipple piercings, and everything magnetic from the vending machines across the hall. Apart from the fact that magnets attract magnetizable, i.e. metallic things, this is pretty much false in all regards. It’s total fantasy.

Now, the magnetic field of nearly all clinical MRI scanners, they don’t turn off. Unlike the final destination, if they don’t turn off, you can’t turn them on. They’re always on 24-7-365. There is an emergency way to turn them off, which we’ll touch on in a minute. Now, unless you work for one of the MRI companies and you have some very specialized gear, MRI scanners also aren’t tunable to different magnetic field strengths. You set them up and that’s how strong the magnetic field is for the rest of their useful life. And contemporary clinical MRIs do not decide to start pulling things into them from across the hall. The magnetic field, the attractive force, doesn’t work like that.

Perhaps one of the most confusing parts about how MRIs work, and the part that’s really caused the most discussion about this incident, it’s really the fundamental basics of how magnetic attraction works. It most definitely is not like what you’ve seen in the Final Destination movies. If you have a strong magnet on the door of your refrigerator, you’ve probably experienced this phenomenon to a much smaller degree, whether you realize it or not. If you take that strong refrigerator magnet and you move it towards the refrigerator, you’re not going to feel any attractive force from across the room. You’re not going to feel any pull even from a foot away or a couple of inches away. You’re not going to feel anything until the magnet is only a very short distance, maybe just a fraction of an inch away from the refrigerator, and then suddenly the little magnet will snap to the surface of the refrigerator door. And if you’re not expecting it, it can be pretty startling.

Now, if we scale up from the little fridge door magnet example to a 10-ton MRI, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a lot more magnetic energy. We’re not going to get into the science behind it in this podcast, but nearly all MRI scanners also have what’s called active shielding, which is kind of like a magnetic girdle or spanks for the magnetic field. It squeezes the MRI’s magnetic field from what it normally wants to be into a smaller volume of space. Now, if we could do the same thing for your fridge door magnet, if we could give it active shielding like the MRI scanner has, that might mean that it doesn’t pull to the surface until you get just a millimeter or two away. And then when it does pull, it pulls with even more force than you would have had in the previous example without the active shielding.

Effectively, this active shielding means that you can get close to the MRI scanner without it pulling on a magnetizable object. Far closer than you could if the MRI scanner didn’t have active shielding. But this means that once you get close enough for it to pull, it’s almost like you’ve hit a tipping point or you’ve flipped a switch, and the magnet can go from nothing to overwhelming with the movement of just a few inches.

Now exactly where that tipping point is physically located inside the MRI room, there’s not one spot. It’s actually going to vary depending on the object being attracted. This launch point for something larger or longer or more easily magnetized, will be further away from the MRI than something that’s smaller or shorter or somewhat resistant to being magnetized. So as a rule, because we don’t know where the launch point is going to be for different objects, we don’t allow anything magnetizable into the MRI room.

Now, remember from our previous episode, when we described how Mr. McAllister walked into the room and nothing happened. And then he went to the side of the MRI table that sticks out from the donut-shaped MRI scanner itself, where his wife was lying, and nothing happened. He grabbed his wife’s hands, nothing happened. He helped her sit up, nothing happened. Then he took a half step backwards towards the MRI scanner, and all of a sudden, the scanner’s magnetic field grabbed that chain and locked around his neck and dragged him into the tube by his neck. He had reached the tipping point.

Both the suddenness and the pull, that remarkable strength of the pull, those are because the strength of MRI magnets, but even more so because of the magnetic spanks that are built into nearly every contemporary MRI. That active shielding that squeezes the magnetic field into a smaller area right around the MRI scanner. It’s really weird looking if you’re not familiar with magnetic attraction, but that leaked video that we talked about before, that shows exactly what you would expect to see if it was a real video.

So now we flash back to Mr. McAllister being yanked into the tube. Head first, he’s likely being choked by the chain, and we’re speculating that could be pressing against his neck with a thousand pounds of force. Clearly, in this situation, you just turn the MRI scanner off. Except that’s easier said than done.

First, a quick rewind on how magnets work, or MRI magnets. Almost all clinical MRIs make their magnetic fields with electromagnets. When you run electricity through a looped section of wire, the flowing electricity generates a magnetic field, which gets stronger with the increase in the number of loops. At the field strengths we use for most clinical MRI scanners today, if you or I had to pay the electric bill that makes a magnetic field that is that strong, 1.5 Tesla or 3 Tesla in strength, if we had to pay that bill just for creating the magnetic field, that would probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 a month for that electricity, or a million dollars a year, roughly, just to make the magnetic field. Well, that’s even before we take any images.

To overcome this limitation, some very clever engineers identified a special kind of wire that when kept at ridiculously cold temperatures like 450 degrees below zero Fahrenheit or 270 degrees below zero Celsius, the wire can act almost like a battery. You can put electricity into it once and it just stays there, even after you disconnect it from a power source. This is what almost all MRI scanners use today, including this scanner in our story.

So if you get your MRI fresh from the MRI factory, a service engineer shows up with what amounts to a fancy set of jumper cables. They hook the jumper cables up to that coiled wire that’s in the middle of the MRI scanner, wires that actually encircle the patient when they’re laying inside the tube, and you pump electricity into that what we’re calling a wire battery. You charge it up until the magnetic field strength gets to where you want it to be, and then you disconnect the jumper cables. You close the hood and you walk away. Now your MRI has a magnetic field even though that part of the scanner isn’t actually connected to electrical power like everything else in the building.

Oftentimes, at the end of an MRI scanner’s useful functional life, or if they need some sort of a major service that requires the magnetic field to be taken away, the service engineers, the people who service and repair these machines, will drag out those jumper cables, connect them to the MRI machine, and siphon off the electricity from our effective wire battery, reducing or eliminating that magnetic field.

But if you don’t have the service engineer with those fancy jumper cables, and you need to turn the magnetic field off, now, how do you do that?

Well, these MRI scanners are all equipped with something called a quench button. This quench button has the effect of quickly turning the electricity in our wire battery into heat, boiling off the coolant that helps keep the wire at its ridiculously cold temperature, and rendering the magnet safe. These buttons look different for different scanners, but they’re always, always mounted on the wall in the scanner room or in the control room, or more commonly in both places.

According to the accounts that we have, after the MRI technologist, the person who operates the MRI scanner, after he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to pull the chain off of Mr. McAllister’s neck, the tech said he pushed the quench button to be able to get him out. But the quench button didn’t work, and Mr. McAllister was still trapped inside the magnet. 

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. 

Before our break, we said how there’s a button that will turn off the MRI’s magnetic field, and the tech said he pushed it, but that, for whatever reason, the button didn’t work. The one way that they know of how to get Mr. McAllister out of the MRI tube by turning off the magnetic field quickly, well, that one way appeared not to work.

Now, that may sound unusual, but there’s actually a precedent for this. A distributor who managed the sales and installations of MRI scanners for GE in India apparently routinely installed the quench button, but just as routinely failed to wire it up to do what it was supposed to do. In 2014, a hospital porter was pinned against the MRI scanner for hours because the quench button failed to work. Similarly, in 2012, there was a fire at an MRI facility in the United Kingdom, and the fire burned through the wiring that connected the quench button to the MRI scanner and made it impossible to quench the magnet when they wanted to finally do so.

There have been other MRI entrapments where the quench button was used to free people. There was a prisoner who was led into the MRI room with a chain around their waist, and that chain was sucked into the MRI scanner with the prisoner still inside of it. There have been patients brought in conventional, not designed to be safe around MRI, conventional wheelchairs, and they have found themselves sandwiched between the wheelchair and the MRI scanner when the wheelchair got attracted. Well, things going flying at MRI scanners is unfortunately a pretty regular occurrence. People getting trapped by things, well, thankfully, it’s not as common, but it still ought to be a known risk to anybody who works in MRI, along with how you respond in a situation if this was to occur.

At this point, it’s probably important to mention that there are a few different emergency buttons associated with MRI scanners. In addition to the one or two quench buttons on the wall that we discussed earlier, there’s typically also an emergency stop button on the wall called the EPO, or Emergency Power Off, which does pretty much what the name suggests. It’s like a giant circuit breaker that shuts off the electricity to the entire MRI system. But remember, that magnet isn’t connected to the building’s electricity. So, the magnetic field is one of the MRI scanner’s functions that that EPO does not turn off. There’s also what’s sometimes called an e-stop on the MRI scanner itself. This will terminate any scan that’s actively running, unlock the slide table, and allow the technologist to pull the patient out immediately, if needed. These other buttons are likely to play a role in future episodes. That’s called foreshadowing, folks.

So they’re trying to get him out. They push the quench button and the magnetic field does not go away, like it was supposed to when you push that button. At this point, it’s pretty clear they’re not getting him out of the MRI scanner, at least not without a lot of help. This is when we suspect that the imaging center called Nassau County 911, and then Nassau County dispatched both police and paramedics to the MRI facility.

If you remember, in the first half of this episode, we said that people were drawing comparisons between this incident and the final destination movie. But there’s actually an unexpected comparison to a silly scene from the TV show Lone Star 911, where the writers of the show have been orderly pinned against the MRI by a gurney, and in order to safely enter the room, the firefighters have to strip down to their underwear. In what may be life-imitating art, we heard that because they could not quench the magnet and dissipate the magnetic field, when the first police officers arrived on scene, they were kept from entering the room for fear that their gun belts and equipment belts would get attracted to the MRI scanner.

Don’t laugh. This actually happened a couple of years ago to a corrections officer at an imaging center in Arizona, getting stuck to the MRI scanner because of a gun belt. Now, we don’t know if Nassau County PD officers stripped down to their underwear, like was done on the TV show, but purportedly, they entered to see if they could help free Mr. McAllister from the chain around his neck.

If you remember the first episode, this was all happening in the back of a semi-trailer, and the MRI scanner is essentially the entire width of the inside of the trailer. The MRI scanner tube is open on both ends, but you’d have to exit the building, go outside the back end of the trailer, have a key to unlock the back access door, open the back access doors, and climb up into the trailer to get access to anything other than what you can reach from the front of the scanner. So if you’ve ever had an MRI and felt like it was a tight space, imagine yourself in the tube with two police officers climbing in trying to be in there with you.

Now, based on the calls that the site made after the police arrived, come back for our next episode when we’ll be talking about those, it’s pretty obvious that the first responding police officers weren’t able to free Mr. McAllister either. We don’t yet have the incident reports from Nassau County PD, but in a TV interview after the incident, Mrs. Jones McAllister described it taking about an hour to get him freed from inside the tube.

After the initial two police officers arrived on scene and were trying to help get Mr. McAllister out, news footage shows that later there were all sorts of police, EMS vehicles, first responders, etc. immediately outside that imaging center. But with the quench button appearing to not work, and only one accessible 70-centimeter opening, just slightly over two feet, to get into that MRI scanner, it’s unlikely that the number of people who had responded were going to make any difference at all in the ability to rescue Mr. McAllister.

Remember from the first half, how nearly all MRI scanners make use of this wire battery design. So even if the municipal power company turned off the electricity to the entire city block, that would have killed the lights and the computers and the closed-circuit video cameras, but it wouldn’t have done anything to cut off the MRI scanner’s magnetic field. The only thing that was likely to be able to do that, well, that appeared to be broken.

Try and mentally put yourself in the position of the people trying to rescue Mr. McAllister at this point. I mean, this accident was never supposed to happen in the first place, and when it did happen, the chain around his neck was being attracted to the MRI magnet with such force that the MRI technologist couldn’t pull it free. Then, the quench button which was supposed to turn off the magnetic field didn’t work. The scores of police and EMTs that show up, and because Mr. McAllister’s positioned in the tube of the MRI, only one, maybe two people can get their arms into the tube and try and wrestle that chain off. Essentially, you’re watching a man being choked unconscious right in front of you, and there’s nothing you can think of to free him.

The imaging center and the personnel on site didn’t prevent this accident in the first place, and now that it’s happened, their first several options of how to free Mr. McAllister have all been unsuccessful. Can you just imagine how their minds had to be racing, watching this man go unconscious right in front of them?

MRIs are such important pieces of equipment that hospitals and imaging centers virtually always have service contracts to keep them in working order. In fact, when you buy a new MRI from the manufacturer, they will by default come with a five-year service contract agreement. Nassau Open MRI bought this MRI scanner, a Siemens Esprit 1.5 Tesla MRI scanner, used. They had a service contract with a third-party independent agency rather than the original equipment manufacturer. Now, that’s not a bad thing. That’s simply the way the industry works.

We’re not sure what they were thinking. It may be that the tech and the imaging center staff and the police and the EMTs who were all on site had run out of options. But someone thought of the one entity that they could contact, the group who knew more about the technical operation of this MRI scanner than they did. And so, in an act of desperation, they picked up the phone.

Twice, twice in a row, to the cubs of all teams, it’s embarrassing.

I know it, I think- To the units, be advised, police and EMS responding to reports of a man entrapped in an MRI scanner at 1570 Old Country Road.

Did they just say what I think they just said? Yeah, I think they did.

Next episode, we’ll pick up the story from here, and we’ll be talking about what they did to try and get Mr. McAllister out of the MRI scanner when that emergency quench button didn’t work. So please make sure you’ve subscribed to the Invisible Force podcast to get each next episode as soon as they drop. 

For this week’s show, our sources were the Final Destination Bloodlines movie that came out earlier in 2025, the Nassau County Police Blotter, Lone Star 911, as well as a bunch of different news accounts of the Long Island accident. We also relied on the leaked security camera footage from Nassau Open MRI that showed the accident, as well as some confidential sources that came from listeners like you. 

Our audio play was voiced by Gwen Langland, Jake Mastrangelo and Julia Schaffini. 

If you have any information about this incident or the people involved or any other MRI accident, please reach out to us. And you can do that through our website, invisibleforcepodcast.com. There you’ll find episodes and show notes and a tip line contact page. 

Also, if you’d rather do it by phone, you can leave us a voicemail with information about this incident or any others at area code 631-MRI-TIPS. That number again is 631-MRI-TIPS. Or if you’d rather, the digits 631-674-8477. 

We 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 luck, we’ll help make sure that accidents like this don’t ever occur again.