The man is trapped in the MRI scanner – with the chain around his neck, steadily being choked to death by this steel constrictor – and the last-resort tool to get him free, the quench button, doesn’t work. In order to get him free, it appears that they’re going to have to come up with some kind of miracle! This episode of the Invisible Force tells the story of whether they did.
With the ‘emergency off’ button for the MRI scanner appearing to malfunction, the staff at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, NY, went for a ‘hail Mary’… they called their MRI service company to come and help force their MRI magnet to quench. The service person rushes across Long Island to the outpatient imaging center and -somehow – the MRI scanner’s magnet is made to quench!
For the first time, they can look to rescuing Mr. Keith McAllister. With the MRI scanner’s magnetic field dropped, the MRI safety worries about emergency personnel in the room evaporate, and they can get him out and to the hospital and to the care he needs.
Show Notes:
Practical fMRI YouTube Video on MRI Attractive force
Nassau County Police Blotter
Long Island 12 News Interview
Leaked Security Camera Footage
Transcript:
“I’m saying, could you turn up the machine, call 911, do something, can’t turn this damn thing off!”
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 online stories as freak accidents. Our entire first season is dedicated to an accident you’ve probably 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 our prior episode, this is a great time to reintroduce you to our co-hosts for the podcast.
I’m John Posh, MRI technologist and educator, MRI accident investigator, longtime advocate for MRI safety practices.
And I’m Toby Gilk, a certified MR safety officer, certified MR safety expert, MR facility architect and safety consultant, and co-author of a new MRI safety textbook.
From our last episode, you’ll remember that Mr. Keith McAllister was drawn into the MRI scanner after he entered the MRI room to help his wife up off the table. He had taken her to the imaging center for a knee MRI, and at the conclusion of that or somewhere during the commission of that, he had entered the room to help her get up off the table. As he pulled her up, he took a step backwards towards the magnet. The heavy chain around his neck got close enough to the MRI scanner and pulled him forcefully by the neck into the tube of the MRI scanner. The technologist and his wife tried to pull him back out, but the attractive force of the MRI’s magnetic field on that 20-pound chain around his neck was just far too great. They then took the extraordinary step of pushing the MRI’s magnetic field kill switch, known as a quench button, to see if that would free him. Imagine their horror when the kill switch didn’t, in fact, kill the magnetic field, and they had to scramble with new ways to get him out, even as the life was being choked out of him. Even with police and paramedics on scene, they simply couldn’t pull him out.
When we left our last episode, Nassau Open MRI was making a Hail Mary attempt, putting a call into their MRI service company. In the previous episode, we told you that it’s pretty much a requirement to have a service engineer take care of an MRI. They’re fussy machines and they need a lot of TLC to keep them in good working order. So if you want to have someone do preventative maintenance and someone to call when something breaks, you pretty much need a service company.
It’s not really different than if you bought a new car and it came with a couple of years of regularly scheduled maintenance. If you buy a new MRI scanner, you often get wrapped up with the five-year service contracts on the company you bought it from. But Nassau Open MRI didn’t buy this MRI and trailer brand new, and they didn’t have a service agreement from Siemens, the company that originally made this scanner. Instead, we understand that they had a service agreement with a company called Intermed, who provides service to all types of medical scanners, mostly up and down the East Coast of the United States.
When the staff of Nassau Open MRI couldn’t kill the MRI’s magnetic field on their own, they put in a call to Intermed, the contracted service company. Intermed apparently dispatched a service engineer from a different client site where they were working on that other client’s imaging equipment, and they dispatched them to go from there immediately to Nassau Open MRI to help with the trapped Mr. McAllister.
We know about this detail because everybody in radiology was talking about this accident, especially people in the New York City area. People who work at some of these other imaging centers who are also Intermed clients, wound up talking with their service engineers who told them about their colleague getting sent to help and try and free Mr. McAllister. We actually communicated with a person who was at a different imaging center where the Intermed service engineer was working at the time when they got that emergency call to leave and go to Nassau Open MRI. It should be noted that these service engineers are extremely well trained and extremely talented, but they’re not generally first responders. We contacted Intermed for comment, but they only referred us to their attorneys who would not say anything.
Now, in future episodes, we’re going to get into who all has lawyered up, what the results of the police investigation were, and ultimately who’s suing who, because everything gets resolved in the courts these days. But that’s to come after we finish getting all of the basic elements of the story nailed down with you.
This is a good time to drop in a quick reminder for our tip line, where listeners just like you can share pieces of this puzzle. You can leave us a voicemail with that information about this incident, at area code 631MRITIPS. That is 631-674-8477. We’ll also repeat that at the end of the episode, in case you didn’t have a pen and paper handy. And remember, it’s tips from people like you that have helped us get this far in this story, like the intermediate details. And you’ll also help us get all the way there and finish the story.
But back to Nassau Open MRI and Mr. McAllister stuck inside the tube. Imagine now that you’re the service engineer and you’re racing across Long Island, 15 minutes from one imaging center to Nassau Open MRI in good traffic. And you’ve been told you have to try and disable the MRI’s magnetic field so that the man being strangled by the chain around his neck can be freed. You’ve been told that the button that’s supposed to do this for them, well, that that didn’t work. And that you’re likely going to have to figure out an alternative way to turn off the MRI’s magnetic field, or this man is going to continue to be strangled.
You’ve heard us mention the quench button, describing it as something of a kill switch for the MRI’s magnetic field. In MRI, this kill switch is the last resort. It’s the thing you turn to, if absolutely you must get that magnetic field turned off quickly, if someone needs to be rescued, if someone’s in danger, this is the button for you. It’s the last resort, because pushing the button isn’t without its own risks. For most MRI scanners, including the scanner in our story, pushing that button releases thousands of gallons of helium gas that starts out at about 450 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. If it escapes into the room, that’s bad for everyone there. There’s also a very real possibility that the MRI system could be badly damaged or even destroyed if the quench doesn’t happen correctly. And assuming everything does go correctly, the MRI would probably be down for a few days and require tens of thousands of dollars in repair and service restoration to get it operational again.
Now, because of all of these reasons, the financial ones as well as the safety ones, we tend to treat quenching the magnet by pushing that button as a last resort. If you make the decision to push that button and it doesn’t work, there really isn’t a list of additional last resort options. Because that’s the end of the list. Now, neither John nor I were there, but I think it’s pretty safe to assume that the people who were there were probably freaking out more than a little bit.
Yeah, this is MRI Nightmare 101. While we don’t know how long it was after Mr. McAllister was initially stuck in the magnet before the site called Intermed for help, we think it’s appropriate to recognize that this was some smart out of the box thinking.
Now, quench buttons are essentially electrical switches. And if you’ve ever taken on rewiring a light switch in your house, you probably know that if you’re willing to mess with the wires, you can turn the lights on and off without the switch by just connecting or disconnecting certain wires. Now the same thing is true with a quench button. If you know how it’s wired up, if the switch itself is broken, you can activate the quench function if you know the alternate ways to wire it all up. Additionally, some MRI systems have automatic internal quench activation systems if the MRI scanner detects certain types of critical faults.
As you heard in the very first episode, while the name of the imaging center was Nassau Open MRI, they had both open format MRI scanners, the ones that look like hamburger buns that you slide between, they’re designed for people who are claustrophobic or of larger size, as well as the tube type MRI scanners. The MRI in our story is one of the tube type scanners. And while lots of breathless TV news coverage showed us all the front of the building, where it was happening, the MRI scanner at the heart of this incident wasn’t actually in that building. Instead, it was in a semi-trailer parked behind the building, connected by an additional structure that functions something like a jet bridge that gets you from the airport to the airplane.
Because this MRI scanner was in a trailer, a lot of the electronics that the service engineer would need to access would be in the back end of the trailer. With how wide MRI scanners are and how narrow semi-trailers are, the only way to access the equipment for this MRI was through the freight door at the back end of the trailer, only accessible from the outside.
So this is the situation we imagine the intermediate service engineer had to be thinking about as they’re driving to Nassau Open MRI. That person was probably running through the various scenarios of whether they could hotwire the quench button or potentially get into the system’s electronics and force a fault that would make the MRI machine quench itself and the fastest way to assess the problem and how to get into the electronics cabinet or equipment cabinets or get around the back of the scanner at the back of the trailer and access all of these things. As we said earlier, MRI service engineers are not generally first responders. First responders have checklists for everything and how it’s to be handled. I’d wager that this is probably pretty unique territory for this service engineer.
Yeah, I would have to agree. In an upcoming episode, we’re going to share information with you that calls into question whether the quench button really malfunctioned. But in the moment, that’s what everyone understood. Now, we don’t yet have information about how long it was between Mr. McAllister being initially dragged into the MRI and when Intermed was called or exactly how much later they showed up on site or how long it was before they were able to successfully quench the magnet. There is a local TV news interview from Fox 5 News in which a gentleman who works at the car wash across the street, Orlando Hernandez, he described seeing smoke come out of the back of the building. In fact, you can go on YouTube and you can look up MRI quench in their search engine. You can see all kinds of videos of different MRI scanners quenching. And a big plume of white smoke, that’s pretty much what escaping super cold helium gas looks like. This is a strong indication that they were ultimately able to quench the magnet some way, somehow.
While we don’t yet have a minute by minute timeline, from the information on the Macalester family’s GoFundMe page, we do understand that overall it took somewhere around an hour to get him freed.
An hour with him stuck in the magnet with the chain around his throat.
That’s a very long hour.
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ABC News included an interview with Dr. Payal Sud, an emergency medicine physician, who was considering what injuries Mr. McAllister may have suffered from having been dragged by the neck into the MRI scanner.
If this was a chain that was wrapped around the neck, I could imagine any kind of strangulation injuries that could happen, asphyxiation, cervical spine injuries. If the patient was slammed against the MRI, any kind of blunt force trauma that we can think about could happen.
According to news reports and interviews with people in the area, the street out in front of Nassau Open MRI must have looked like an emergency services used car lot with police cars, fire trucks, ambulances all gathered outside the building. Many of the police and firefighters and paramedics, they probably were standing around waiting for nearly an hour, really most of them powerless to do anything to stop the MRI from strangling Mr. McAllister with that heavy steel chain around his neck. They’ve been waiting for the magnet to be quenched, and now that it has, now they can finally get to work.
We don’t have reports of how Mr. McAllister was treated on scene, but we have to imagine that the paramedics had a number of concerns to address before trundling him into an ambulance and driving him three miles from Nassau Open MRI to the Nassau University Medical Center.
In emergency medicine, it all starts with the ABCs, airway, breathing and circulation. Since Mr. McAllister had the steel chain around his neck, and we’ve speculated that the magnetic attraction could have exerted a thousand pounds of pressure on his neck and his throat, this could have reduced blood circulation through his neck, as well as crushed his windpipe. As Dr. Sud speculated, the force could have also done damage to the part of Mr. McAllister’s spine that was in his neck, the cervical spine.
We expect that before he was put into the ambulance, the paramedics would want to do several things, starting with establishing an airway. If there were concerns about his windpipe being crushed, or if he wasn’t breathing on his own, they probably would have placed a trachea tube down his throat, and begun manually ventilating him with a football-sized squeeze ball that pushes air into his lungs. If his heart had stopped, they would have likely begun chest compressions or CPR, and perhaps defibrillated him by shocking his heart. If there were any significant concerns about damage to the vertebrae in his neck, they would have likely put an immobilizing collar on his spine to effectively hold his head still and prevent his neck from bending.
It’s a general rule that you never want to do these sorts of things, emergency treatments, inside an MRI scanner room. In our prior episode, we referred you to what we think is a ridiculous Lone Star 911 episode in which the firefighters stripped down to their underwear to work inside the MRI scanner room because we had heard that the first police officers who arrived on scene had to take off at least their gun belts in order to safely enter the MRI scanner room before the quench had happened.
Best practices are always to take the patient out of the MRI scanner room so that emergency responders don’t have to enter the room with the immensely powerful magnet. But by this time in our story, the MRI scanner’s magnetic field had largely been eliminated or dissipated and it wasn’t going to be restored without specialized equipment and engineers. In other words, that million-dollar MRI scanner was, in that moment, one of the world’s most expensive paperweights. So the paramedics were free to respond and bring any gear they needed into that MRI room.
While they were free to bring anything they wanted into that room, remember the room is exceptionally small. It’s roughly the size of a long and skinny walk-in closet. With an ambulance gurney, there wouldn’t really be much additional space to work in. If you’ve seen the leaked security camera footage of the actual incident, you know just how tight those quarters were.
As soon as they safely could do so, they probably pulled him out of the magnet into the control room to attend to his needs, stabilizing him for transport, et cetera. After they got an airway established, got his heart started if it had stopped, and got his cervical spine immobilized, they would then likely have rolled him through the facility, carried the gurney down the stairs, wheeled him out into an ambulance waiting at the curb, and taken him to the hospital.
If you go to the Nassau County Police Department website, their publicly available information about what happened is really very sparse. The Homicide Squad reports the details of a serious aided that occurred on Wednesday, July 16th, 2025 at 4:35 p.m. in Westbury. Serious aided is just a category meaning that they responded to a call for help. The notice goes on to say, “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, 61, entered an unauthorized magnetic resonance imaging room while the scan was in progress. Now, we’ve already uncovered information that contradicts at least some of that. 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. The investigation is ongoing.”
As listeners to prior episodes of our podcast, you probably already know that the detail in the Nassau County PD report has some errors in it. The MRI wasn’t in progress. Mr. McAllister may not have specifically been authorized to enter the room, but the security camera video doesn’t show the MRI technologist objecting to his entrance into the scanner room itself. To us, this sounds like the imaging center was trying to frame the events in a way that would be most favorable to them.
But there are elements of truth in the initial aided report. He was wearing a large chain. He was drawn into the MRI scanner. And he was eventually taken to an area hospital and declared to be in critical condition.
I’m saying, could you turn up the machine, call 911, do something, can you turn this damn thing off?
Next episode, we’ll pick up the story from the hospital. So make sure you’ve 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 different news accounts of the accidents, which included Fox 5 and ABC news coverage, as well as details from the family’s GoFundMe page, the Nassau County Police Department’s website, as well as several confidential listener sources.
Our intro audio was taken from an interview that originally aired on Long Island News Channel 12. That interview was with Mrs. Jones McAllister.
If you have any information about this incident or the people involved, please reach out to us through our website invisibleforcepodcast.com. There on invisibleforcepodcast.com, you can find episodes and show notes and a tipline contact page.
Also, you can leave us a voicemail with information about this incident or any other MRI accident. And you can reach us and leave a voicemail at area code 631-MRI-TIPS. That number again is 631-MRI-TIPS, or if you rather have the digits, it’s 631-674-8477.
We’d also ask you to like and share our podcast with your friends and colleagues. With your help, we’ll unravel the mystery of exactly what happened. And with a little bit of luck, we’ll help make sure that accidents like this don’t occur again.
