A man passed away from injuries sustained on Wednesday after entering the MR suite of an imaging facility in Long Island, NY with a large metal chain around his neck.

The 61-year-old victim, who was not a patient at the facility but there to support his wife during her scan, was pronounced dead from his injuries on Thursday afternoon, according to a police statement.

Adrienne Jones-McAllister was undergoing an MR on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband, Keith McAllister, to help her off the table. She told News 12 Long Island that the technician summoned her husband into the room, who was wearing a 20-pound chain "with a large lock" that he uses for weight training.
As her husband came closer, the machine pulled him into the bore. “He waved goodbye to me and then his whole body went limp,” Jones-McAllister told the TV outlet.

According to MR safety expert Tobias Gilk, the magnetic field attraction acting on a steel object like a steel chain can be 100x the weight of the chain. In this case, the chain may have potentially exerted up to 2,000 pounds of force "horizontally based on magnetic attraction and the power of MR scanners."

The incident took place at Nassau Open MRI in Westbury, an outpatient imaging facility in Nassau County that advertises open bore MR capabilities. It is unclear at this time what the strength of the magnet in question was. The facility has declined opportunities to comment and the police say an investigation is ongoing.

"If this was a chain that was wrapped around the neck I could imagine 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 could think about could happen," Dr. Payal Sud, an emergency medicine and medical toxicology physician at nearby Northshore University Hospital told ABC News.

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