6 people in New York City have died this year after ‘subway surfing,’ a renewed social media challenge

By Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN

(CNN) — A 13-year-old girl is the latest person to lose her life in New York City while “subway surfing,” a dangerous challenge attracting young people on social media.

“Subway surfing,” involves riding on top of a subway car while its moving.

Yes, while it’s moving.

The precarious trend, which has been around for years, has gained popularity again on social platforms, encouraging users to replicate videos heralding it, despite the risky – and illegal – activity’s sometimes-fatal consequences.

Six subway surfing fatalities and 181 related arrests have been recorded this year through October 27, the New York Police Department told CNN on Tuesday. Both tallies are outpacing last year’s five fatalities and 118 arrests, which can yield a charge of reckless endangerment, the department said.

While it wasn’t immediately clear why they did it, the 13-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl ran atop moving train cars Sunday in Queens, New York. Both lost their balance, with the 13-year-old killed after falling between moving cars, a law enforcement source told CNN. The 12-year-old suffered a head injury, with bleeding on the brain, CNN affiliate WABC reported.

Days earlier, a boy who’d just turned 13 was killed subway surfing in Queens, while another subway surfer “narrowly avoided tragedy after striking his head in the Bronx,” the NYPD Chief of Transit said on X. The 13-year-old died while participating in a social media challenge, his mother told WPIX, adding he’d posted to social media prior videos of himself doing the stunt and she’d warned him not to ride on top of trains.

“This dangerous thrill-seeking behavior has life-altering consequences. It’s not worth your life or the anguish you’d bring your family and friends,” New York Police said in the X post before concluding with a slogan coined as part of a campaign launched last year to try to deter subway surfing:

“Subway Surfing Kills! Ride Inside, Stay Alive.”

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has worked with social media sites including YouTube, TikTok and Instagram to remove footage depicting subway surfing to discourage the practice, with more than 10,000 posts taken down, the agency told CNN affiliate WABC in September.

And Meta, Google and TikTok have made space on their platforms to help amplify a new citywide messaging campaign, the city said Thursday in a news release.

Even so, 14 attorneys general across the United States last month sued TikTok in part over the proliferation of dangerous viral challenges, and some families of teens killed while surfing subway cars also have sued social platforms.

Social media, indeed, has “entirely changed in so many different ways” the conventional adolescent dare, said Dr. Gail Saltz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and an associate attending psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

“Your communities become huge, potentially,” she told CNN, “and it seems like everyone who you choose to follow, or even don’t choose to follow, become part of that peer pressure, that outside influence of the people that you want to be part of or that you want to impress or that you want to get attention from and be socially acknowledged (by) in some way.”

The NYPD also is using drone technology to help apprehend subway surfers based on 911 calls from concerned citizens – and deter would-be offenders – though the agency doesn’t prioritize arrests, it told CNN. Rather, police try to show drone-captured videos to young people’s parents in an effort to get them to stop surfing the subway.

In one video police posted, people stand and walk on top of moving subway cars as strong winds buffet them. Some lie on their stomachs, and others wedge between train cars. Later, plainclothes police officers waiting inside train cars apprehend the subway surfers as they enter, the video shows.

Though it’s unclear how fast those particular cars were moving, the average subway train in New York City can travel as fast as 50 mph, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesperson told CNN.

“Once a subway surfer is found, a field team will hold the train at the next station and remove them,” the city said Thursday, noting the effort has “helped save” 114 people, ages 9 to 33 – with an average of 14 years old.

Internet challenges aren’t anything new

New York Mayor Eric Adams was “heartbroken to hear that subway surfing — and the pursuit of social media clout — has stolen another life,” he wrote Monday on X in response to the most recent teen’s death in Queens. “We are doing everything we can to raise awareness against this dangerous trend, but we need all New Yorkers — and our social media companies — to do their part, too.”

“No post is worth your future,” he added.

Social media challenges for years have drawn eager scrollers. They’ve included awareness campaigns like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and more choreographed, light-hearted ones like the Mannequin Challenge.

But sometimes, the concept has been dangerous and resulted in injuries, such as with the Milk Crate Challenge and Tide Pod Challenge, and even ended in death, as with the Benadryl Challenge and subway surfing.

On Instagram and Facebook, subway surfing videos can violate the Coordinating Harm and Promoting Crime policy, owner Meta told CNN while declining to comment on the latest death Adams posted about. The platforms remove content that depicts, promotes, advocates for or encourages participation in high-risk viral challenges except when it raises awareness of or condemns them; those posts get labeled as sensitive, Meta said.

TikTok previously cooperated with New York authorities to remove subway surfing content, the New York Times reported in January. TikTok and Google/YouTube have policies barring content that encourages or could facilitate dangerous challenges; those platforms, plus Reddit and X, have not responded to CNN’s questions about how they handle potentially dangerous challenge content on their platforms and Adams’ call for them to “do their part.”

Still, a combination of social pressure and attention-seeking behavior fuels these challenges as likes, comments or shares rack up on a particular trend, said Saltz, the psychiatrist who hosts the podcast, “How Can I Help?”

It’s “cognitive behavioral positive reinforcement,” she explained. “Like giving a dog a treat … and then they want to repeat that behavior, because it made them feel good, it gave them a dopamine rush.”

And that in itself can become addicting for those who thrive on taking risks, Saltz said.

Parents should have question-based conversations with young people about what they find – or don’t find – intriguing about these challenges, she said, and arm them “with some real life stats of why certain things are dangerous and not worth it and other ways their kids could perhaps achieve or get the things that they are looking for or be heard in what they feel they’re missing.”

Lawsuits allege TikTok encourages dangerous behavior among youth

“TikTok challenges” in particular are highlighted in lawsuits filed last month against the popular short-video platform and its owner, ByteDance, by a bipartisan group of 14 attorneys general from across United States, co-led by New York’s Letitia James and California’s Rob Bonta, both Democrats.

The suits allege, among other impacts, “TikTok challenges” can encourage dangerous behavior among young users.

“We strongly disagree with these claims, many of which we believe to be inaccurate and misleading,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said in a statement in response to the attorneys general’s legal actions. “We’re proud of and remain deeply committed to the work we’ve done to protect teens and we will continue to update and improve our product. We provide robust safeguards, proactively remove suspected underage users, and have voluntarily launched safety features.”

Meanwhile, the mother of a teen who died subway surfing last year — and whose death is cited in James’ suit against TikTok — has sued in part the social media companies on whose platforms her suit claims he saw images of the unsafe practice.

In February 2023, 15-year-old Zackery Nazario was subway surfing on a Brooklyn-bound train on the Williamsburg Bridge, according to the Social Media Victims Law Center, which represents his mother against TikTok, ByteDance and Meta.

Norma Nazario sued the platforms on the anniversary of Zackery’s death, alleging the companies are responsible for exposing her son to subway surfing content, the firm said. The teen had climbed to the top of a train and hit his head on a steel beam, causing him to fall onto live electrical lines before he was run over by another carriage, the center said.

TikTok and Meta declined to comment on active litigation.

“Our attack is not the fact that the platforms allow subway surfing material on there to be uploaded on their platforms,” Nazario family attorney and firm founder Matthew Bergman told CNN on Wednesday. “Our attack is that their platforms are unreasonably dangerous because they direct kids to this material that they’re not looking for (and) that they monetize it.”

CNN’s Brynn Gingras and Carolyn Sung contributed to this report.

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