A 15-year-old boy has been taken to hospital with critical injuries after he embraced the ‘subway surfing’ teenage fad plaguing NYC.
The teenager had struck his head on an object and was found unconscious and covered in blood on top of the subway’s roof as it stopped at a station in Queens at 6:30 yesterday evening.
Cops and firefighters managed to pull the injured boy from the roof and laid his unconscious body on the subway platform for paramedics to assess his injuries.
Police say the youngster had been laying on top of the moving train as it traveled southbound to the 111th Street Station, North Corona but had smashed his head on an unknown object.
In dramatic footage, the boy’s white t-shirt shirt is splattered with blood and his head is bleeding profusely as a medical team work to stabilize him. A heart resuscitation kit can be seen next to one of the medics.
The unnamed daredevil was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital where it’s reported he remains in a critical condition.
The ‘subway surfing’ stunt is becoming a popular social media fad for teens in New York. This incident is the second of its kind in two weeks, and social media is awash with death-defying videos of ‘surfers’ clinging onto subway roofs.
According to the city, NYC subway surfing incidents have been on the rise in recent years. In 2019, there were 461 reported incidents of people riding atop subways, a 15 percent increase from the previous year.
The same year, 14-year-old Eric Rivera tragically died surfing a No. 7 train near Queensboro Plaza. His mom, Maritza Santos said she had thought she had seen her son on news footage about subway surfing, but he had denied it was him:
“I asked him was it him and he was like ‘no’,” she said.
“I told him it’s very dangerous, that he could get hurt, that he could pass away from that”.
Eric had told his mom he was going to see a movie, but instead was seen by subway workers climbing onto the roof of the subway with 2 friends. He was found “unconscious and unresponsive” on the tracks after his head struck an object and died of his injuries.
“He was just with the wrong dumbass kids,” said Eric’s older brother, Jason Santos, 21.
“I loved him so much, I would have kicked his ass”.
Earlier this month, NBC New York obtained footage of a group of youths standing up and dancing on top of an elevated subway car in Brooklyn. The video was uploaded to TikTok by one of the teens.
The head of subways for New York City Transit said subway surfers are not only dancing with death but are also playing with the lives of emergency service workers:
“It not only puts the surfer at risk, it puts our first responders at risk, it can put our employees and even our customers at risk,
“It’s something we want to eliminate completely,” she said.
“This behavior is reckless and incredibly dangerous and it needs to stop”.