Long Island man wearing 9kg-metal necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine
Long Island man wearing 9kg-metal necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine
Dude was wearing a 20lb chain while his wife was getting an MRI.
She freaked, and yelled for him, and he ran into the room while the machine was still on and fucking died.
This is 100% their fault, I could almost see an argument that the door needs a lock to prevent idiots with 20l s of metal around their neck from running in, but you don't want to lock everyone out in case there's an issue.
You could put an airlock like metal detector door that only opens the second door, if the first door is closed and there's nothing magnetic inside. People could still go in quickly in emergencies, but nothing that makes it worse can enter.
As much as the machines cost, something like that wired up with a metal detector so that if the machine is on and there's metal in the airlock it will never open would actually be a good solution....
But it would take a society that values human life and absence of suffering over money. Because like someone else pointed out, the hospital ain't the one paying to fix the machine.
Maybe Canada would be interested?
Just for your information, the machine, meaning the magnet, is ALWAYS on.
Unless something gets stuck. Then it is shut down and restarted after the thing is removed. Takes hours though, I think the startup was four hours.
They had that happen at the hospital my father worked at, the cleaning lady brought in a stool with steel legs. They tried to remove it by force first, but four men could not do it.
Huh, I thought this was nonsense, but googling proved you're right. Very cool TIL!
I’m just thinking about the poor woman. She’s forever going to be haunted with the knowledge that she was the one who called him into the room, and thus led to his death. His decision to come in wasn’t thought out, but that probably won’t relieve her feelings of guilt for having called him in. Such a tragic story.
Uh she was in the room likely still on the bed laying down considering the story given. So like she'll have some rowdy memories of dude getting mushed into a machine a speed then slowly suffocate if they weren't lucky enough to hit their head really really fucking hard.
She's not going to have one whit of self awareness. I may be going out on a limb here, but it doesn't sound like he was exactly the sharpest bulb in the ocean, and her reported cry to "turn off" the MRI (despite the repeated screenings you get prior to an MRI, warnimg patients about metal) indicate she isn't either. She's 100% gonna blame the provider and sue, adding to the rising cost of healthcare.
There is a lot of conflicting information in the articles im finding about this incident, from her shouting and him running in to him entering the room with the technician, and the technician knew about the chain and had commented on it.
Lmk if you need some examples, but theres a lot.
Im (cynically) inclined to believe that the hospital were the first to give statements and did a quick its-not-our-fault response. Then more people were interviewed. Ill always side with the working class (imo everyone who is not ruling class) rather than the corporations. And in the US the hospital is a corporation for sure.
There's some gross racial spin surrounding this too, see pic below. It was a weighted padlock steel necklace for his weight training, not whatever is implied by yahoo.
Don’t forget to pay the repairing fee for the machine
Metal detector on the door to the room.
That door should absolutely be locked while in operation. That door being forced open should be an e-stop event.
Someone could walk in there with a firearm or a bowey knife or anything.
Then the door will always be locked, unless the MRI is being serviced, as the magnet is always active. Kinda kills the point of the machine, no? That said they could put in more safeguards for sure. Though you would think all the signs on and near the door, and the extensive explanation you get, would be enough. But here we are.
His wife told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
Where does it say he ran in? I mean, what you say sounds right, but this doesn't read like "freaking out"
Edit: Sounds like she did not freak out, but called to him to help her stand up after it was complete (bad knee), but before he was authorized to enter. This seems more like an honest mistake and tragedy. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/20/health/mri-machine-death-long-island
I... want to see that 9 kg necklace. I mean, sounds like it's just a big-ass chain, but if so, how did it not throw up red flags all around letting this guy wear it around that machine.
It wasnt a necklace...
It was a literal metal chain, like steel. Not a gold cuban link chain or something with a huge medallion a rapper would wear.
Apparently this idiot just lived everyday with a 20lb length of chain around his neck for "weight training". The article mentions it was "a topic of discussion" on a prior visit, so it wasn't a one time thing.
The type of person to do that, is 100% the type of guy to run into an active MRI like he could do anything. Theres no logical thinking going on, and an outright refusal to listen to qualified medical advice. Like, they make weighted vests, at least do that instead of putting all that weight on your neck.
Yeah, there was a guy in my town who would run around with one of these around his neck. Similar type of idiot. He would actually run by the strength training gym and gloat to us that we were wasting our time lol, insisting that all we had to do was run around with a big chain.
Hearing about this news story now I wonder if some influencer somewhere started a trend. People love feeling like they found “the secret”
The type of person to do that, is 100% the type of guy to run into an active MRI like he could do anything. Theres no logical thinking going on, and an outright refusal to listen to qualified medical advice.
Darwin, engage!
Sounds like a possible Darwin award nomination.
how did it not throw up red flags all around letting this guy wear it around that machine.
He wasn't allowed in the room.
His wife panicked in the MRI, he charged into the room he was told not to go Into.
Imagine the scene from her POV. She's claustrophobic and having a meltdown because of all the hums and bangs and then her husband comes running in only to get pulled into the machine she is already stuck inside of. He's screaming and can't get pulled free while she is being pushed even harder into the machine she so desparately wants free from - by her husband who is quickly suffocating to death
According to the article, it was a weight training chain
Easy solution : have a pure gold necklace, since gold isn't magnetic
I believe it can still get hot
Moving fields, eddy currents still apply.
Copper isn't magnetic either https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu1uRvErM80
Easier solution: take off your damned metal necklace.
Was the necklace even related to the death? It says he had a "series of heart attacks" which doesn't sound like something caused by being pulled toward the machine.
Did no one else read the story? I read it and it sounds moreso the clinic's fault
The necklace he was wearing was a steel weighted exercise band, not a normal necklace. He's not flexing his wealth or anything
His wife told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
Seems like the technician was told by the wife to bring her husband in to help her up. The technician/clinic made a mistake by letting in the husband, who didn't seem properly warned about MRIs no metal policy. The technician also somehow didn't catch the giant "necklace" he'd be wearing.
The "he wasn't supposed to be there" seems like a coverup for their mistake, since how else would he have known to go in? Someone must've told him to walk into the room, it's not like he could hear through the door.
Edit: 100% the technicians fault, the technician saw it. It even had a metal padlock.
They’d even discussed his training and the hard-to-miss chain with the MRI technician during their previous appointments, Jones-McAllister said.
“That was not the first time that guy has seen that chain” on her husband, she said. “They had a conversation about it before.”
Thank the gods for you. I was reading these comments thinking I was insane.
I'm not saying it's the husband's fault, but I don't think it's 100% on the technician either.
I read it more like she asked the technician to get her husband and called out to her husband who presumably just walked in.
Also, "they discussed the chain on a previous visit" doesn't really change anything. Depending on how many people that technician sees and when that last visit was, they might've just forgotten.
When McAllister entered the exam room with the technician, the machine suddenly “switched him around, and pulled him in,” Jones-McAllister said.
This was part of the other article I linked. It's a lot of "they said she said" but I'm gonna put more faith in the victim's word and not the clinic's.
Why even wear the stupid necklace when going to the MRI in the first place? Like, how thoughtless and selfish can you be? Always assume you are surrounded by barely-functional morons, especially in the medical field which seems to attract these types of people, and think defensively.
"Geez, I'm going to be near an MRI machine, maybe I'll wear a 20 pound piece of steel around my neck? Genius! Let's do it!"
9 fucking kilograms!? For my fellow Americans, that’s almost 20 pounds!
Can you convert that to tennis balls? I can't do this math on my own
Somewhere between 150 and 160, depending on the tennis balls. Hope this helps
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=9kg+%2F+mass+of+a+tennis+ball
Edit: Additionally, that's about 63½ European swallows, assuming an average weight of 5 ounces. Given that a European swallow must beat its wings 43 times per second to maintain airspeed velocity, it'd be a proper racket.
The only units I understand are bananas or bald eagles. Please adjust accordingly
I used robots and the answer was 160 tennis balls, which is actually much less than I expected.
I feel like someone should have noticed. I'm pretty sure I've never seen someone wearing a twenty pound necklace.
I always knew Roughneck McGee would meet a tragic end. Ironically he wasn't even wearing his BIG necklace.
What kind of hospital let him get near the room with that kind of metal around his neck? I've had to be in several hospitals recently for different imaging issues and every time the MRI is a thing I have to remove everything metal to go past a certain door (escorting my daughter and son for medical reasons). I don't know who let him anywhere near the room with something that large.
Edit for Clarity: I've had to be the one removing all metal even though I'm not the one being scanned. For me to progress beyond a certain part of the hospital toward the MRI I needed to get rid of everything. My children were being scanned, not me. So, I'm not sure what hospital system allowed this man with a 9kg chain get this far deep into the imaging area.
He wasn't supposed to be in the room. There was a scan in progress when he entered.
Seems to me all they needed was a magnet of equal or greater strength placed opposite of, and perhaps a bit closer to the doorway, to pull intruders away from the MRI room.
His wife told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
Whole thing is heart breaking all around. I feel for the technician who made an honest but very serious mistake. And I'm sure the wife will spend her days regretting asking for help. Just a fucking tragic situation. :/
all they needed was a magnet of equal or greater strength
MRI magnets are electromagnets that are supercooled with liquid helium and take hours to start or stop because of the electrical energy that has to be put in or taken out.
So just having a magnet of equal strengh for idiot defense would be a very significant waste of electricity and helium unfortunately
It really sucks, but of course it was an idiot from Nassau county 🙄
For anyone who might not know the area, Nassau County is the place that gave us George Santos. It is burgundy-red, only bested in racism by Suffolk county. The police departments are notoriously racist and will pull you over and interrogate you just for driving a beater. This was one of Trump's favorite police departments during his first term, he infamously told them to bash people's heads against their cop cars when arresting them.
Sadly there are many very left leaning people trapped on Long Island, unable to leave because LI is an employment wasteland. It's not cheap to live on LI either.
Anyways, an idiot from Nassau won't be missed.
Do not forget it was LI was basically kkk hq for a while.
The man, 61, had entered the MRI room while a scan was underway
How was that allowed?
he asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table.
...while the machine was still working? And isn't that the job of the technician anyway?
the technician helped her try to pull her husband off the machine but it was impossible.
Those machines have a kill-switch for a reason.
I call this BS or a very incompetent technician.
Plus a Darwin award for the guy.
Couple things:
The magnet is ALWAYS on.
The "kill switch" takes about five minutes to actually deactivate the magnet and it costs about thirty grand in helium every time you push it.
The kill switch is VERY expensive to press, many thousands of dollars, and even when it does an "instant" magnet quench, by the time you hear the screams it's all over anyway, the metal has landed on the magnet. Quenching the magnet will make it let go, but it won't unbreak the neck bones.
the high powered magnet is always on. it's never safe to put metal near and MRI.
We need a /c/NotFinalDestination, this is literally one of the scenes in the last entry to the franchise.
Came to say the same. Probably not the first but definitely the first I can remember a headline about.
In the case of FD, a different part gets injured in that scene.
Again, why aren't there metal detectors at the entrances to MRI machines everywhere? For the cost of those machines, the cost of a metal detector is peanuts
A - standard metal detectors probably won't work well right at the MRI room door. Some facilities may have a longer hallway for access and putting one there, far from the actual MRI suite, would make a lot of sense (I think I visited one location that had that layout), but not all facilities are laid out in a way that that could work.
B - the nature of how a metal detector works would probably have negative impacts on MRI image quality if it is too close to the imager - even outside the shield room door.
I did a sort of tour of a couple dozen MRI facilities for a couple of years, the stronger ones all have radio-frequency shield rooms complete with metal / gasketed doors that are supposed to be closed during imaging. Actual practice regarding keeping those doors closed was pretty loose in the places / times I was visiting. And, in the article's case it sounds like imaging wasn't in progress so the door was probably standing open...
not at all practical. a big ol buzzer would have prevented this maybe, but really it's the relaxed culture around the MRI that let it happen. people need to be told either you don't go past the big heavy door with the NO METALS sign, or you get all the metal off you now, or both.
not at all practical
Simple question: why?
You put in a metal detector, and hell, a second door that won't open if metal was detected. These aren't the costs compared to the cost of a single MRI machine.
Surely 9kg necklace isn't something you can just sneak around with, how was he allowed to get close enough to an MRI machine in the first place wearing it?
Hospitals aren’t jails or high security government facilities. I could walk around a hospital right now and walk into an MRI room and nobody would physically stop me. I used to work in a hospital and we had a long meeting about signs, because a cleaner didn’t look at the door sign and walked into an MRI room with a metal floor buffer.
I would need an entourage of physiotherapists if I had the bling to roll with a 9kg necklace.
Imagine how dope my rhymes would be though. A man can dream....
Because hospital staff have better things to do than baby sit every person that walks in? They are pretty well known for always being overworked already.
True winner of a Darwin award
9 kilograms Necklace?! What kind of necklace is that?
A chain with a 9kg bell weight.
Don't know how quickly custom vinyl stickers can be bought & delivered, but someone needs to slap a "Died Like A Cartoon Character" achievement on his casket/headstone.
So glad to find that Lemmy is even less empathetic than reddit was. Real faith in humanity killer. Shocking how many people decided to comment without touching the article, really proud to be here..
Welcome to the freely accessible internet. I'm sure there are "private message boards" with much more rigorous vetting of their participants, if that's what you need.
So, if the MRI spins at 12 RPM, does the dude also spin at 12 RPM?
Asking for a friend.
I imagine his head was plucked like a ripe tomato in the garden.
I doubt it, obviously depending on the applied force.
Skin is rather tough to rip with a blunt tool so yeah, maybe the head was disconnected from the spine immediately, making him look like a giraffe spinning at 12 RPM round and round.
Just going through comments spreading MRI information (source: I work with MRI scanners). Nothing is spinning inside the MRI machine. CT scanners have an internal spinning component, but MRIs do not.
The detector spins around the patient, but does the magnetic field spin too? I though not, but I'm not that certain.
He didn't see the new Final Destination movie.
Carrying a 9kg necklace seems a bit silly. Though I suppose "for weight training" could just as well mean something medical, like needing to build up muscle mass after an operation.
What I need to know is: how is a man that was "not supposed to be in the room" specifically getting fetched by a technician to go into the room? I would have said "do not go past the antechamber" a dozen times on the way there. Did the wife calling out to him just turn off his brain, did the technician fail to inform him, or did they both not realise the metallic necklace was on him?
After reading another article: nope, necklace was just a huge locket on a chain. And the wife said "Keith, Keith, come help me up" which sound to me like:
If I was married and a bit dumber, I could probably also be lured to my death with my name being called out twice in that fashion. Really depends how good the signage was and how well the husband was informed.
They have extensive screening and education and safeguard procedures, for the patients. I'm guessing hubby skipped (probably wasn't even offered) all those and just dashed in the door when called. Tech still should have put hubby through "the talk" if he was anywhere close to the door to the room.
MRI is one of the most sci-fi come to life technologies most people are likely to encounter in their lives. Superconducting magnets are about as non-intuitive as it gets, once they get you past the point of your ability to resist the force, there's no recovery - you're going faster and faster until the metal hits the housing. There have been multiple accidents with steel oxygen cylinders - for the obvious reason: they're so common in the environment where MRIs are used, and it's no small feat to get the cylinder removed.
hes going to have neck problems if he had lived, 20lbs on the neck will cause spinal deformities, and disc disease.
What does it mean to have a "series of heart attacks"
Anyway I wouldn't wish this on anybody. It is also terrible for the wife who had to watch her husband die.
Edit:
Better source: https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/20/health/mri-machine-death-long-island
Even that article fails to mention if and when the magnet was quenched.
That's nothing. Remember the guy who brought his gun with him and the machine helped him shoot himself?
I think it was a cop too. Mri machines doing a service to humanity
that’s terrible :(
i assume he must have thought because the machine was off it wasn’t an issue
and died of a heart attack as well damn
RIP Mr T.
That's some Final Destination shit right there.
One and only one headstone that includes a mention of a big ass magnet as the cause of death in rap format.
9kg-metal necklace
Did he drag his knuckles?
As if my claustrophobia wasn't enough reason to irrationally strongly dislike the idea of needing to get an MRI again...
Dude didn't watch Final Destination Bloodlines 💀
Cube: MRI
Geez, imagine how much it would cost to repair.
This is in the US, so about as much as the exam itself.
This is why our education system is under funded.
Who cares about a moron who needs a 9kg necklace, how's the MRI machine?
It was for weight training
Yes, I remember the part in Pumping Iron, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he was using a 9kg necklace in preparation for his role in The Terminator.
This is stupid. He knew his wife was getting an MRI. He was an irresponsible ass and ignoramus. What was more important? His wife's MRI or his precious necklace weight training, at 61 no less?
And he had multiple heart attacks? The picture of health.
And now a MRI machine is out of order, how many people's tests have to be rescheduled for one 61 year old's fantasies of being a weight training badass? Your wife needed an MRI, put the high school jock nonsense aside for an hour or two.
"It was for weight training". Fuck me.
Let people enjoy the bling they earned.
He can enjoy it at home. He could if he were still alive I guess.
Why wasn't the door to the room locked while the machine was running?
Tldr for safety
To actually answer your question instead of piling on, it's a hospital, not a prison. In case of emergencies, the door absolutely cannot ever be potentially locked, even while the machine is on.
With how easily something can go wrong in an MRI, they need quick access without the addition of special keya/badges to get inside or relying on people inside to hit some lock release.
In cases like this it makes perfect sense to have a lock because an idiot was outside and ignored all the warnings. A lock would have prevented everything that followed him entering.
Buuuuuuut unfortunately we can't cater the entire world to the biggest idiots, if only for the safety of the less idiotic who might have a heart attack in the MRI and need to be quickly pulled out, or a piece of metal that snuck into their food and is now ripping out their insides.
In most situations where an emergency happens inside, quick reactions save lives, and locks slow reactions down to the slowest mechanism, which might be "I don't have the right RFID badge, go find another person who has one or the guy inside dies"
while the machine was running?
In an MRI, the magnet is always on, even when the machine isn't running. You can't ever go near it with metal on.
Maybe they should also baby proof all the electrical outlets so fools like this don't stick forks in them?
How else is he supposed to get the premonitions?
A 6 pound necklace…
1kg =2.2 pounds. more like a 20 pound necklace.
Reading more about the story I wonder how much of it is true
You can't just "walk into an MRI room", for one
When the MRI is working you definitely can't just walk in. Nobody is in there because of the radiation, so i doubt they just have an open door policy
Then, when there is an emergency like, you know, someone being strangled with a 9kg necklace on his neck by the machine's magnetism, you can press the kill switch that will quench the magnet by venting out all cooling liquid. This will damage the machine and is also a very expensive little joke, but it would save the life of that guy. Why didn't they do that?
It's a similar story to the guy that went into an MRI with a gun, causing it to fire and kill the guy.
Nobody is in there because of the radiation
What are you saying, there is no radiation in an MRI Scanner. It works with Magnets instead of X-Rays.
Nobody is in there because usually there is only one operator and this guy sits in the next room at his metal computer, which can't be in the MRI room, looking at the scan results. The doors are closed because MRIs are loud as hell.
Okay 3 things.
9kg is almost 20lbs, which is even more ridiculous
