32-year-old man dies after getting sucked into MRI chamber, hospital staffers arrested

A man accompanying a patient for an MRI has died after he was sucked into the machine’s chamber.

The New York Post reports that Rajesh Maruti Maru, 32, died at a hospital in India after he had taken his sister’s mother-in-law to her MRI appointment.  According to the Indian Express, Maru was holding an oxygen tank when he got sucked into the machine and trapped there.

“Magnetic force of the machine sucked him in. We are not sure how he went so close. An inquiry is on,” Dr. Ramesh Bharmal, whose relationship to the accident is not known, told the Indian Express.

According to NDTV, hospital staffers allegedly asked Maru to hold the oxygen tank, which is a metal cylinder, despite the family’s insistence that it was unsafe.

“When we told him that metallic things aren’t allowed inside an MRI room, he said ‘sab chalta hai, hamara roz ka kaam hai‘ (it’s fine, we do it every day). He also said that the machine was switched off. The doctor as well as the technician didn’t say anything,” Harish Solanki, whose mother was the patient, told the news station.

“As soon as Rajesh entered with the cylinder, it turned out that the machine was on,” Solanki said.

A source told the news outlet that after Maru got pulled into the machine, the cap of the oxygen tank dislodged, causing an oxygen leak.

Staffers reportedly pulled Maru from the machine but he had been severely injured by that time, and died in the hospital’s emergency room ten minutes later.

The staffer who instructed Maru to bring the oxygen tank into the MRI room and a doctor at the hospital have both been arrested.

 

[Feature image: Facebook/Rajesh Maru]