‘I wish I could have my son back’: Subway surfing continues as NYC scrambles to halt the trend

New York City appears to be losing its battle against subway surfing.

People continue to die while riding outside of subway cars despite efforts to deter children and teens from engaging in the stunt, according to NYPD statistics.

Six people have died from subway surfing in 2024, compared to five the year before, according to NYPD data. All but one of them were minors. The trend has led some experts, lawmakers and commuters to worry that the practice will continue costing young New Yorkers their lives.

People have ridden outside or atop New York City's trains seemingly since they’ve been running. But platforms like TikTok and Instagram have come under fire for amplifying the practice, prompting at least one lawsuit and raising concerns about the role social media plays in encouraging dangerous stunts. As the city battles subway surfing, experts warn that the allure of social media clout remains a powerful, if deadly, motivator for young people.

The average subway surfer is 14 years old, but the NYPD said officers have caught people as young as 9 attempting the stunt.

In 2023, the MTA launched an awareness program in which it enlisted teens for audio announcements and posters warning their peers not to participate in the dangerous practice. The MTA, City Hall and several social media companies also made a deal in which the social media companies agreed to remove subway surfing videos from their platforms. The NYPD also said it was deploying drone technology in an effort to monitor subway surfing citywide.

Despite those efforts, however, there have been 212 reported train surfing incidents in 2024, in which 14 people were injured, according to data obtained by the NYPD on Dec. 1.

The first subway surfing incident of 2024 occurred less than two weeks into the year, when a teen died while on a train at Avenue N and McDonald Avenue in Brooklyn, police said. Before the end of January, a man in his 50s died while subway surfing at the Prospect Park station, authorities said. The most recent subway surfing death occurred in late October, when police said a 13-year-old girl died while riding on top of the subway in Queens.

Mayor Eric Adams posted a statement on social media soon after her death, saying he was "heartbroken to hear that subway surfing — and the pursuit of social media clout — has stolen another life."

During a City Council hearing in November, NYPD officials blamed social media sites for prompting the dangerous behavior.

“We see social media as the major driver of this behavior,” said NYPD Chief of Transit Joseph Gulotta. “We see from surfers trying to capture and share edgy content on social media platforms is a phenomenon that we did not see in decades that passed.”

‘I wish I could have my son back.’

Norma Nazario’s 15-year-old son, Zachary, was a history buff who liked researching old buildings across the city. He loved Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and planned on joining the Marines after graduating from high school.

But in 2023, he was struck in the head by a beam while riding atop a Brooklyn-bound J train on the Williamsburg Bridge, causing him to fall between two moving cars, according to police.

“I tell everyone, if they could come knock on my door and bring my son back, I would drop everything. That’s all I think about. I wish I could have my son back,” Nazario said.

Nazario said she never heard her son talk about subway surfing before. But after his death, she found videos of other subway surfers on his cell phone.

“I really wish I could’ve done something about it but I had no idea that social media was all about that, about these challenges,” she said.

In February, Nazario, who lives in the East Village, filed the first lawsuit in the country that attempts to hold TikTok, Meta – which also owns Instagram – and the MTA responsible for a subway surfing death.

Her attorney, Matthew Bergman, said he’s confident that they have a case.

“Zachary Nazario’s death was neither an accident nor a coincidence. It was the foreseeable coincidence of the deliberate decisions that Meta and TikTok made to elevate its profits and user engagement over public safety,” Bergman said.

Bergman, who is also the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, said he expects more lawsuits like the one filed by Nazario’s mother will continue to pop up in the future.

“Social media sites are addictive by design. They attain that addiction not by showing kids what they want to see, but what they can’t look away from,” he said.

TikTok, Meta — which also owns Instagram — and the MTA did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Gothamist.

‘It’s like whack-a-mole.’

The 13-year-old girl who climbed atop a subway car at the 111th Street Station in Corona, Queens, in October was the sixth person to die from subway surfing in 2024, authorities said. Commuters at the station have noted that the practice has become all too common.

Several people shared stories of peers riding atop trains in order to make content on social media.

Valerie Namias, 15, said her friend knew the 13-year-old who died at the station last month.

Still, the 10th grader said she still sees classmates subway surfing in the mornings while on the way to school. “I know some people do it to embarrass their crushes, their friends, stuff like that,” she said.

Angel Pedraza, a 13-year-old and soon-to-be ninth grader, said his school made him and his classmates do class presentations on the dangers of subway surfing.

He remembers seeing police cars around the station after the most recent victim died while subway surfing at the Queens station. “A lot of people at school were talking about it. It was very shocking to me,” he said.

Joshua Bryant, a 17-year-old high schooler, said his parents are the reason why he would never subway surf. “If I did that, they would kill me myself. I don’t even need to get on the train,” he said.

But most child and developmental experts say the phenomenon of teens engaging in "high-risk behaviors" for the sake of impressing their peers is hardly new.

“Adolescence is a time in life in which the part of the brain — the amygdala — that houses emotional processing of fear, risk and excitement is working on overdrive,” said Dr. Gail Saltz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

Saltz said that most people won’t outgrow this developmental stage until their early to mid-20s, and added that social media has become an unexpected source of inspiration for high-risk behavior.

City officials said they’ve flagged more than 10,000 videos that depict children and teens subway surfing, and social media sites have agreed to take them down. TikTok users who search for "subway surfing" are redirected to a landing page that warns “some online challenges can be dangerous, disturbing or even fabricated.”

But their efforts aren’t foolproof. Searches for certain abbreviations of the phrase still led to thousands of videos on the social media app that hadn’t been taken down.

“It’s like whack-a-mole,” Saltz said. “You can take down a lot — which I absolutely think is worth doing to diminish numbers — but it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to, in an ongoing way, completely censor or prevent this information from being available.”

TikTok, Meta and Instagram did not respond to requests for comment. The mayor’s office and the MTA also did not immediately reply to requests for comment.