“He was walking toward me, and the machine just snatched him like a magnet from hell,” Adrienne recalled, sobbing. “I screamed at them to turn the damn thing off, to do something.”
But it was too late. The powerful magnetic field of the MRI pulled Keith violently into the machine. His body struck the massive equipment with tremendous force. He suffered multiple cardiac arrests in the moments that followed and later died from his injuries, according to Nassau County Police.
The machine was still scanning when Keith entered—an error Adrienne claims rests squarely on the shoulders of the technician who invited him in, despite the glaring safety risk.
“That tech had seen that chain before,” she said. “They had even joked about it during earlier visits—things like ‘Wow, that’s a big chain!’ So don’t tell me he didn’t know it was dangerous.”
Adrienne says the MRI technician made a grave mistake by calling her husband into the room while the machine was active and while he was wearing visible metal—a well-known hazard in MRI environments.
Keith’s stepdaughter, Samantha Bodden, also spoke out on Facebook, placing full blame on the technician and calling out misleading news coverage suggesting Keith entered the room unauthorized.
“That’s a lie,” Bodden wrote. “The technician went out to get him. He brought him in. He failed to warn him to remove the chain—and that failure cost my stepfather his life.”
A GoFundMe set up by the family has raised funds for burial expenses, while also correcting public misinformation about the tragedy.
“He was stuck to the machine for nearly an hour before emergency crews could release him,” Bodden added. “My mother and the tech tried desperately to pull him off, but it was impossible.”
Even now, the family is reeling from the trauma of a moment that should never have happened. MRI rooms are supposed to be highly controlled environments, with strict no-metal protocols and highly trained staff.
Instead, Adrienne says, a deadly mistake took away the man she loved.
“He only came in to help me,” she said through tears. “Now he’s gone.”
The case remains under investigation, but the family is calling for accountability, and change—so no one else has to suffer the way they have.
“It was a preventable death,” Bodden said. “And someone has to answer for it.”