NEW YORK — New York Police officers arrested a 17-year-old for “surfing” the 7 train in Queens Wednesday night, not even 48 hours after a 15-year-old boy who was doing so Riding a J train over the Williamsburg Bridge, he hit his head on a piece of the span and fell under the train, which struck and killed him, authorities say.
The 17-year-old in the Queensboro Plaza case, which occurred around 10:15 p.m. Wednesday, was not injured. Cops charged him with reckless endangerment after seeing him ride on the outer rear platform of the last car when he pulled up at the station, according to authorities. They say the teenager has no criminal record or traffic citations.
Monday’s tragedy involving Zachery Nazario in Brooklyn was the second such death in the county in less than 90 days. Nazario was on a Manhattan-bound J train shortly before 11 p.m. Monday when he fell, according to police.
He died on the spot. His mother, Norma Nazario, said she believes he was distracted or looked to the side and his head hit a beam, knocking him onto the tracks. She also said that her son had spent the day in Brooklyn with his girlfriend and that he was returning home when he died.
“I don’t wish this on any mother,” Norma Nazario said, adding that her son dreamed of one day joining the US Navy.
She said she had never talked to her son about the dangers of “surfing” on the subway because she didn’t even know it was something teenagers had been doing. The mother blamed social media for driving behavior in young people.
His death came about two months after an eerily similar incident in Brooklyn claimed the life of another 15-year-old boy. He was on top of a J train and fell when it stopped at the Marcy Avenue stop in broad daylight on December 2. The child made contact with the electrified third rail and was killed.
About six months before that, a 15-year-old boy lost an arm in a terrifying “surfing” incident on the Queens subway in late August. And in mid-June, wild video surfaced showing people riding atop a subway train as it crossed the Williamsburg Bridge. There were eight people on top of that J train during the early December trip. No one was hurt, but the MTA tried to draw attention at the time to what they described as a concerning and growing dangerous trend.
The transit agency does not differentiate between reports of subway navigation versus movement between train cars versus other incidents of people riding off trains, but lumps them all together into an annual sum. Either way, the number of incidents skyrocketed last year.
In 2022, there were 928 reports of such incidents. That’s more than double the number reported the year before (206) and in 2020 (199), though those years may have seen data affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Still, the 2022 figure represents a 160% increase over 2019 levels (passenger numbers in November and December 2022 had returned to roughly 2019 levels).
“Riding the subway is not only illegal, it’s super reckless, extremely dangerous, and people die doing it. Tragedies like this are preventable,” NYPD Acting Traffic Chief Michael Kemper said earlier this week.