AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Play subway surfers2/9/2024 ![]() Mayor Adams has requested social-media companies remove videos of kids surfing, and TikTok culled many of the videos that went viral last year. As I rode the 7 train back from Fraser’s memorial with Michael, an automated message played over the speakers: “It is illegal and very dangerous to ride or walk between train cars.”įamilies have asked city officials and companies to do more. In April, the MTA issued a memo to train crews reminding them to look for people riding outside the trains. He fell once onto the tracks but wasn’t seriously hurt and continued surfing that day. It was something that just brought me joy.” He surfed multiple times per week. I just had a lot of adrenaline in me.” No one caught him, and Michael was hooked. “Then I see cops on the platform, so you got multiple people on radios calling it in. “It was too late for him to stop the train,” he says. As the train started to move, the operator of an incoming train rolled down his window and started to yell at Michael. He first surfed the 7 train in the summer of 2021. In high school, he began “urban exploring,” or sneaking into abandoned buildings and tunnels and onto rooftops with a group of friends. Inside a tunnel from the top of the train. It’s “not an addiction.” But he also admits, “Running on top feels like you’re in a real-life movie.” But after about a month, he started back up. His mother also confronted him after she saw one of his viral videos, but “I always tell her, I know what I’m doing,” he said.Įfaru, a 14-year-old boy from Queens, began surfing when he saw a video of it on his TikTok For You page, but briefly stopped when his parents begged him. He admitted he once snapped his ankle when he fell into the gangway between cars. Three of his friends have been arrested for surfing, and another two have died, but “I just feel free doing it,” he said. But that doesn’t deter “Losu,” a 16-year-older surfer from Queens. Those caught subway surfing by the NYPD are usually charged with reckless endangerment. But he knows his one-man campaign is limited. ![]() Michael now tells everyone who’s doing it to stop. Over the past eight months, he’s lost Wooden, Fraser, and another friend - Zackery Nazario, a 15-year-old who died in February surfing a train near the Williamsburg Bridge. Most of his close friends also stopped - after Wooden’s death, they briefly changed the name of their group chat to “We Didn’t Die” - mostly out of a sense of relief. Michael quit surfing last December when he woke up to the news that another friend, 15-year-old Ka’Von Wooden, had died surfing that morning. Going through a tunnel on top of a train. (Last year still holds the record of 565 for the same time period.) The rise in numbers has also meant more deaths: Fraser was the fourth teen to die surfing in New York in 2023 there were two last year. This year, the total number of people riding outside the trains in the first six months of 2023 has far outnumbered the 20 totals at 455. The MTA, which tracks the instances of people riding outside the trains (it does not separately count surfers), saw a noticeable spike in 2021. Some also begin after playing the mobile game Subway Surfers, which simulates the experience. But a new generation of teens is drawn in by the rush of seeing the reactions on TikTok and Instagram. In New York, subway surfing has been around since at least the 1980s. Many also record and share their surfs online, and by the beginning of 2022, the videos began going viral. Some surfers even sprint. Others stand on the ledges of the cars at the back of the train. Most surfers climb to the top of the trains and lie down, kneel, or stand while the cars are moving, even if they’re going as fast as 50 mph. Like many, the 19-year-old began subway surfing in his mid-teens. “I’m very grateful I cut this shit out.” As he spoke, he kept tugging on the skin of his throat. “And we found out who’s next.” He stared at the memorial. “I told everybody, before Jev died, I don’t want to find out who’s next,” says Michael, who declined to share his last name. It had been a month since Fraser fell to his death while riding the top of the 7 train. ![]() ![]() Next to an empty Calypso Lemonade bottle, a bouquet of flowers, and a Jamaican flag handkerchief, he arranged a smattering of tea candles to spell “JEV.” That was what he and his friends called Jevon Fraser, a 14-year-old teen he knew from surfing the subways. On a steamy July afternoon, Michael knelt beside a makeshift memorial tucked near the wall at the 33rd Street–Rawson Street subway station.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |