NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — A 17-year-old boy was caught trying to subway surf on top of a Queens train Wednesday, according to police, just days after another teen was killed from the stunt.
Police found the teen climbing onto the roof of the last car of a departing 7 train bound for Flushing around 10:15 p.m. at the Queensboro Plaza station in Long Island City.
Officers were able to flag down the motorman, stop the train and safely remove the teen from the top of the train.
The boy was not criminally charged, but the cops wrote up a juvenile report for reckless endangerment.
The incident occurred two days after 15-year-old Zackery Nazario died while subway surfing on a J train across the Williamsburg Bridge. He was hit by a low-level beam, fell in between train cars, was run over and died at the scene.
In December, another 15-year-old boy was killed, also while subway surfing on a J train, near the Marcy Avenue subway station in Williamsburg.
The MTA doesn’t keep data specifically for subway surfing, but it saw a 160% spike in 2022 from 2019 levels in incidents of people riding anywhere outside of train cars.
It attributed the spike to social media, with a flurry of subway surfing videos posted in the spring and summer of 2022. By December 2022, the levels had returned to 2019 levels, officials said.
MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said Thursday the agency is setting up meetings with a handful of social media companies, demanding they take down the videos.
"I don't think they would run video of people playing Russian roulette with live ammo," he said. "That's what they're doing when they put up videos of people standing on the top of trains."
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