On a late spring afternoon, two boys celebrating the last day of sixth grade set out through their New York City neighborhood in search of an adventure.
It arrived in the form of a subway train screeching into the Church Avenue station in Brooklyn. The boys, Donald Munoz and William Layden, hoisted themselves onto the roof of one of the cars and were soon careening north, the warm air whipping across their faces.
But their escapade was brief. Near the next station, they clipped an overpass and were flung onto the tracks. The impact fractured both boys’ skulls, and Donald died that day. He was 11 years old. William, 12, was taken to Kings County Hospital, unconscious.
The year was 1938. But it could have been any year.
Recent news reports typically trace the reckless act of riding atop a train car in New York City — known as subway surfing — back to the 1980s and blame sensational videos on social media, taken by bystanders and the surfers themselves, for a recent rise in popularity.
But accounts of subway surfing incidents can be found from the earliest days of the city’s transit system, more than a century ago, and have an eerie familiarity.
These urban daredevils, then and now, share a common impulse, experts said: to seek out a jolt of adrenaline, a buzz, with whatever limited options might be available to them.
“Since God made the subways,” said Al O’Leary, a former chief spokesman for the M.T.A., “people have been doing stupid things on them.”
In recent years, for reasons that vex public officials, subway surfing has grown increasingly deadly. Six people have died attempting it this year. Five died in 2023, following the five in total who died from 2018 through 2022. The drumbeat of senseless tragedy has led city officials and concerned observers to wonder whether anything can be done.
The angst is not new. In 1996, after the death of a 14-year-old boy, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor of New York, delivered a grim assessment:
“There is no way that you can protect a child who decides to surf on the top of a subway car,” he said.
By most indications, he appears to have been right.
‘We Should Try This’
The thought process that steers a person to the roof of a speeding train can seem implausibly simple. It felt that way for Justin, an 18-year-old from the Bronx, who learned of subway surfing in 2021 from a YouTube video. This prompted a rather straightforward conversation with a friend.
“I was like, ‘Yo, we should try this,’ said Justin, who asked that his surname be withheld to speak freely about an illegal activity. “And he was like, ‘Bet.’ So we tried it.”
After school one day that September, the boys ascended the stairs at the 167th Street station in the Bronx, entered the train at the middle of the platform, slipped out a back door of the car and climbed onto the roof.
Their nonchalance evaporated. “My heart was beating,” Justin said. “The wind was blowing in my face. The train was shaking. I thought we were going to get blown away.”
The boys rode one stop before scrambling off at 161st Street. Back on firm ground, Justin noticed his hands were trembling.
The rush, he said, was intoxicating. In the months that followed, he surfed “more times than you could count,” seeking out new sections of the system to ride, growing confident enough to run and jump atop the trains as they sped through the city.
While the nature of train surfing — illicit, mostly furtive — can make practitioners difficult to track, subway workers describe a system essentially teeming with them.
Omar Velez, a train operator who has worked for the M.T.A. for more than three decades, said he hears reports of subway surfers every day that he works on the 7 line, most commonly just before and after school.
The M.T.A. does not specifically tally subway surfing incidents. It reported that 2,556 people rode “outside of train cars” this year through September, but the vast majority of those cases, officials said, occurred between cars, not on top of them. (In 2019, in comparison, there were 490.)
The prominence of subway surfing, then, tends to be computed in the most macabre of ways: fatalities. This year, the ages of the dead were 11, 13, 13, 13, 14 and 15. They died riding atop the A, F, G, M, 6 and 7 trains. Their accidents occurred in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens.
“All these children are brown or Black, and nobody cares, ever,” said Y’Vonda Maxwell, the mother of Ka’Von Wooden, who died after falling from a J train last December. “I have seen this happen since the ’80s. I am sick of it. I want the M.T.A. to do something about it.”
Max Sugarman lives in a third-floor apartment in Long Island City, Queens, that looks directly onto the tracks of the 7 line — so close that he frequently makes eye contact with surfers — and has noticed increasingly larger groups atop the train, often with someone acting as a videographer.
“And they’re getting bolder,” he said. “They’re jumping. They’re sprinting.”
The constant filming and sharing of subway surfing videos on social media is a distinctly contemporary problem — and one, officials say, that has contributed greatly to the recent surge in deaths.
But the heedless bravado of these daredevils long predates the digital age.
In 1923, three boys from the Upper East Side — ages 9, 10 and 11 — were caught by police while riding on top of a train on the now defunct Second Avenue Elevated line.
According to the Brooklyn Eagle, when informed that they would have been crushed at the next station, the 11-year-old, Owen Carroll, merely shrugged.
“It’s all in the game,” he said.
Deterrence and Desperation
On the afternoon of Halloween this year, a police officer named Nicholas Nolan was perched on the rooftop of P.S. 11 in Woodside, Queens, gripping a device that looked like a portable video game system to implement the city’s latest defense against an intractable problem.
In the sky above him fluttered one of the three drones the department has used since October 2023 to catch surfers in the act. The program identified 114 offenders in its first year, the youngest of whom, according to Mayor Eric Adams, was 9 years old.
Time will tell whether the program achieves lasting results or falls frustratingly short, like many of the city’s other initiatives.
In recent years officials have unveiled a “ride inside, stay alive” public information campaign in subways and schools and have positioned more police officers around hot-spot stations. Transit leaders have also tried to persuade social media companies to remove thousands of videos of people surfing the subway — though many remain easy to find.
As the problem has persisted, discussions around deterrence have betrayed a sense of desperation. Leroy Comrie, a state senator whose district includes a section of Queens, wondered aloud at a budget hearing last year whether the city could “grease the tops of the trains” to prevent people from getting up there.
New York must contend with some hard truths. Physical alterations — like open gangway cars and platform barriers — would be likely to deter would-be offenders. But the city’s subway system is old and immense, with 472 stations and 665 miles of track, making wholesale structural solutions onerous and unlikely.
There is also some question of whether conspicuous messaging campaigns have the desired effect. Mr. O’Leary recalled some hand-wringing decades ago at the M.T.A., with some staff members wondering if they were merely popularizing the stunt and giving impudent teenagers more rules to defy.
That rebellious spirit, officials have found, can be hard to curb. On the rooftop, Mr. Nolan explained that some teenagers had been adapting to the new surveillance, changing clothes, for instance, to create confusion when the drones spot them.
“We’re flying behind them, and they’re giving us the finger,” Mr. Nolan said. “Sometimes they wave.”
So far, the drone program has not stemmed the tide of deaths.
Still, Kaz Daughtry, who oversees the program as deputy commissioner of operations for the police, expressed confidence in its prospects and said there were other innovative ideas “floating around with the M.T.A.” When asked for specifics, he declined to elaborate.
“I’m pretty confident that we are going to come up with some sort of solution to fix this,” Mr. Daughtry said. “And then we’ll probably move on to something else when the kids find something else to do.”
His quip seemed to touch on one plainly vexing aspect of this predicament — that it was propelled to some extent by the urban ennui experienced by bored, mischievous and often disadvantaged young people.
“Most of these kids are not bad,” said Janno Lieber, chief executive of the M.T.A. “These are not kids who are necessarily involved in criminal activity. They’re just doing something that is incredibly dangerous and reckless.”
Kenneth Carter, a psychologist at Emory who studies thrill-seeking behavior, said firsthand accounts of subway surfers suggested they may be wired to chase the same buzz as people who participate in more socially acceptable forms of daredevilry, like skydiving or racecar driving. But those activities can be prohibitively expensive.
“They feel like a lot of people think they have a death wish,” Mr. Carter said. “But universally they say, no, they feel closer to life when they do this. They chase things that give them that sense of awe.”
Joe Lucenti, 45, who subway surfed regularly while growing up in the 1990s graffiti scene in Brooklyn, concurred. An adrenaline junkie, Mr. Lucenti said bungee jumping, skydiving and scuba diving fell short of the high he felt on the train.
“When you’re on the train, and it’s 5:30, and the sun is coming over the skyline, and the wind is coursing over you, it just feels incredible,” he said.
‘I Need to Stop.’
After a couple of years and hundreds of illicit rides, Justin’s zeal for subway surfing would begin to cool. But first he got caught.
One afternoon, while surfing on the J Line, Justin’s train screeched to a halt. It was the police. He slipped down and sprinted along the track to the next platform. But more officers were there to tackle him. His parents picked him up from the local precinct.
Mr. Daughtry said four or five surfers were similarly caught each week by the police. While the police typically prosecute adults who subway surf on charges of reckless endangerment, criminal charges are not filed against teenagers under 16. Police reports are made for each incident, but they do little to deter children from the practice, and repeat offenders are common, Mr. Daughtry said.
Such recidivist behavior is why Michael, 20, a train surfer who quit recently after seeing acquaintances get hurt (and who also asked for his surname to be withheld), said more dramatic messaging was required.
“Forget the announcements,” he said. “They need to start showing the dead bodies of these kids and nail it into their brains that they shouldn’t do anything like this for TikTok clout.”
Justin developed his own second thoughts about surfing after a brush with catastrophe on the Williamsburg Bridge — he narrowly missed an overhanging beam near the spot where someone he knew was killed. More than anything, though, he grew bored with it. The act, somehow, had come to feel routine, and he declared himself done.
His restraint proved fleeting.
So at the tail end of a year in which anti-subway-surfing messaging reverberated across the transit system, in which a fleet of drones was unleashed into the airspace above the 7 train, in which half a dozen adolescents needlessly succumbed to gruesome injuries and a city continued to grapple with a swell of senseless, self-inflicted tragedies, Justin went out to subway surf again.
“I need to stop,” he said.
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