Widow Sues Nassau Open MRI a Year After Husband Died Pulled Into Scanner by His Chain

Nearly a year after Keith McAllister died when his weight-training chain pulled him into an active MRI machine in Westbury, New York, his widow has filed a lawsuit against the clinic. Adrienne Jones-McAllister accuses Nassau Open MRI and three affiliated companies of negligence, saying staff let her husband walk into the scan room without checking him for metal first.

The complaint, filed in Nassau County Supreme Court, claims a technician invited McAllister into the room to help his wife off the table after her knee scan. Nobody screened him. Nobody told him to take off the chain. McAllister was not a patient that day.

The suit names Nassau Open MRI, East Coast Radiology, Sun Enterprises and GM Partners Westbury as defendants, and argues the facility should have shut the machine down before letting him in. Jones-McAllister is represented by attorney Ben Crump, whose past clients include several high-profile wrongful death cases, along with New York State Trial Lawyers Association president Andrew Finkelstein.

She’s seeking unspecified damages, saying she suffered lasting psychological injuries from watching it happen.

How he died

McAllister, 61, went into the room on July 16, 2025, wearing a 20-pound metal chain he used for weight training. The machine’s magnetic field caught the chain and pulled him toward the scanner. He stayed pinned to the machine for close to an hour before staff and responders got him free.

“He went limp in my arms,” Jones-McAllister told News 12 Long Island. McAllister suffered several heart attacks and died the next day at a nearby hospital.

Nassau Open MRI has declined to comment on the lawsuit, and hasn’t responded publicly to the family’s account of what happened in the room.

Court filings show the case took nearly nine months to reach a judge, even after the family lawyered up within weeks of the accident. Jones-McAllister’s team says the delay was about building the case properly, not about doubt over what happened.

MRI deaths from metal objects are rare. Medical imaging experts have long pointed to strict screening at the door as the standard fix, exactly the step the lawsuit says never happened here.

Hospitals and imaging center around the world, rely on the same screening step this lawsuit says was skipped. This just shows that the safeguard only works if someone actually enforces it.