NEW YORK — The death of a 15-year-old subway surfer trying to ride a train across the Williamsburg Bridge is the latest in a long line of fatalities among daredevils illegally riding the rails atop train cars.
The MTA says it doesn’t keep statistics on how many subway surfing busts it makes. But agency data show a sharp spike in incidents of people riding outside train cars — nearly double prepandemic numbers.
A whopping 928 people were found riding outside subway cars last year, more than four times as many incidents as in the previous two years. In 2019, the last full year of data before the pandemic tanked subway ridership, 490 people were caught riding outside a train car.
An MTA spokesman told the Daily News that the agency’s data do not specify whether riders were found “surfing” a subway train or simply riding between cars.
But the uptick in incidents mirrored subway surfing videos going viral last spring and summer, the spokesman said, with violations dropping again in the fall.
“We’re going to do a series of things to raise awareness,” Mayor Adams vowed Tuesday, describing the teen’s death Monday as “really traumatic.”
“This was really a terrible tragic incident of this young man. Our team is going to do a host of things, to bring awareness, to speak with young people and really show how dangerous it is.”
Zackery Nazario climbed to the top of a J train as it passed over the Williamsburg Bridge, which connects Manhattan and Brooklyn, on Monday night. He was run over by the train after being knocked to the tracks by an overhead beam and died at the scene.
“I cannot imagine the pain, suffering and heartbreak going on right now in this child’s family,” NYPD transit chief Michael Kemper said at Tuesday’s meeting of the MTA’s board. “Tragedies like this are avoidable — don’t do it.”
The boy’s death comes less than three months after another 15-year-old boy, Ka’Von Wooden, was killed in December while trying to surf another J train near the same spot. Ka’Von died after falling onto the third rail outside the Delancey St.-Essex St. station. He suffered severe head trauma died at the scene, police said.
“We have some incidents where some young people survive from doing it,” Adams said Tuesday. “But when it doesn’t our young people have a tendency to believe it’s not a dangerous encounter. It’s very dangerous.”
Train surfing is illegal under the MTA’s rules and regulations, which penalize train surfing under the same regulation as moving between subway cars. Violators are subject to a $75 fine, though an NYPD spokesman told The News they could also be charged with reckless endangerment, depending on the circumstances.
Adams put a lot of the blame on social media posts glorifying daredevil stunts.
“I don’t think that we have properly analyzed what social media is doing to us in general, but specifically to our young people, and I am hoping that the president calls a national blue-ribbon commission to really analyze this,” Adams said. “Some of these sites , they’re more addictive than drugs. People can’t get off them.”
“They’re robbing our children of their innocence,” he added. “The national government must come in and say, ‘What is the corporate responsibility of social media?’ ”
Two upstate brothers, Drew Hogan, 21, and John Hogan, 19, were slapped with criminal charges last September after they were found straddling a train in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Their arrest came just days after cops nabbed a teenage trio for riding into Sunnyside, Queens, atop a train.
Weeks before, 15-year-old Hamza Mohamed was run over by a train in the Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue station after he fell from its roof. The boy survived but lost half of his left arm.
A month earlier, another 15-year-old boy was lucky to be alive when police found him on the roof of a train unconscious from an apparent blow to the head.
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