Subway surfing boy busted climbing on back of train
A 17-year-old boy was caught trying to subway surf on a Queens train, police said Thursday.
Cops on patrol at the Queensboro Plaza station in Long Island City spotted the teen clinging to the back of the last car of a departing No. 7 train on its way to Flushing about 10:15 p.m. Wednesday, an NYPD spokesman said.
The teen was another potential victim in a troubling spike of daredevils illegally riding the rails outside of train cars. His apprehension came two days after a 15-yearold boy died subway surfing on a J train rumbling over the Williamsburg Bridge.
In Wednesday’s incident, cops managed to flag down the motorman, stop the train, and remove the teen from the back of the train before he had a chance to climb to the roof of the train car.
The teen was not criminally charged, but cops wrote up a juvenile report for reckless endangerment.
On Monday night, Zackery Nazario climbed to the top of of a J train and crashed into a low metal beam. He fell in between train cars as his girlfriend watched in horror.
He was run over by the train and died at the scene.
“I just don’t want it to happen again because to my knowledge, he’s the second kid this happened to,” Zackery’s heartbroken mother Norma Nazario told the Daily News. “Hopefully, his friends will stop and will definitely realize it happened to the first one, and it happened to him. Just stop. Just really stop. It’s illegal. I’m sorry that, you know, he didn’t listen.”
The MTA has seen a sharp spike in incidents of people riding outside train cars — nearly double pre-pandemic numbers.
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.
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, MTA officials said.
MTA officials urged parents and educators to help spread the message about the dangers of riding outside train cars.
“We cannot stress enough how dangerous it is to ride on the outside of trains,” NYC Transit President Richard Davey said following Nazario’s death. “We implore other families to speak with their children on the real dangers of what can seem like a thrill but is too often deadly.”
MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber joined Mayor Adams this week in calling on social media sites to stop posting videos of teens subway surfing, which promotes the dangerous activity.
“The right thing to do is not to put up these videos, which obviously have negative consequences,” Lieber said on the “Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC Wednesday. “If they were running videos of people playing Russian roulette with live bullets they would understand the consequences — and this is the equivalent for kids who are encouraged to do this by the glorification video.”