Two teenagers in Pennsylvania have been charged after a 17-year-old lost his life and a 20-year-old sustained severe head injuries while participating in dangerous TikTok trends.
Northampton County District Attorney Stephen Baratta announced the charges in a press conference on Tuesday (September 22), stating that the county has had “two criminal investigations involving the dangerous and reckless use of an automobile to create what are known as stunt challenges.”
Baratta said involuntary manslaughter charges were brought against a 17-year-old male driver following a stunt challenge held on June 1 at the Freedom High School parking lot.
Two teenagers have been charged after participating with their friends in dangerous TikTok stunt challenges
Image credits: Andrej Lišakov/Unsplash (Not the actual photo)
Trigger warning: this article contains descriptions of fatal and severe injuries and reckless behavior involving vehicles
The juvenile driver is accused of tying a folding table upside-down to the back of his vehicle with a rope and pulling it through the parking lot while a 17-year-old friend, identified in reports as David Nagy, rode on top.
The driver “recklessly operated his vehicle at significant speed such that it whipped the rider sitting on the table into another parked vehicle,” resulting in his fatality.
In a separate incident, 19-year-old Eniya Serina Alvarado faces multiple charges after allegedly operating her vehicle while her 20-year-old female friend stood on the trunk.
Image credits: kodiak_boys/Instagram
Baratta said the challenge “involved a friend surfing on the back of a moving vehicle as it drove through the park-and-ride parking lot on William Penn Highway” in Northampton County.
“Unfortunately, the friend was thrown from the moving vehicle and received catastrophic head injuries that will be permanent in nature.”
The two separate incidents resulted in a 17-year-old losing his life and a 20-year-old sustaining severe head injuries
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Alvarado was reportedly driving at 35 mph while her friend stood on the trunk and rear windshield before falling and striking her head on the pavement.
The woman was rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital-Anderson in Bethlehem, where she was listed as being in critical condition and later transferred to a rehabilitation center, as per The Independent.
The 19-year-old faces charges including aggravated assault, aggravated assault by vehicle, careless driving, and persons hanging on a vehicle.
Image credits: Connell Funeral Homes
The district attorney hopes to highlight the dangers of blindly following online challenges that can have harmful or even fatal consequences.
“It’s important for the public to understand that these challenges can have severe, real-world consequences, creating significant risk to participants and sometimes the bystanders as well,” said Baratta.
“The families did have a closeness and a trust with these close friends. I mean, they knew them very well. That’s what’s so heartbreaking in this case.”
Image credits: CBS Philadelphia
While investigations in both cases remain open, Baratta added that neither driver had “criminogenic thinking,” meaning they didn’t plan to injure the victims with the stunts.
Still, he determined that “the action of these drivers was so grossly negligent and reckless that it constituted a criminal, culpable state of mind.”
According to Baratta, the parents of both victims said their children had “agreed to participate” in the TikTok challenges.
Despite their children’s consent to participate in the stunts, the parents want the accused, both of whom are first-time offenders, to be held accountable for causing the fatalities.
“These challenges can have severe, real-world consequences, creating significant risk to participants and sometimes the bystanders as well,” said DA Baratta
Image credits: Solen Feyissa/Unsplash
They are “concerned that if no charges were brought, only the victims would pay the ultimate price for their injuries and not the drivers who actually caused the injuries,” Baratta added.
“These parents do not want other families to go through the same horror and pain that they had to endure.
“I promised these families that in return for the admission by these drivers that they engaged in this criminally reckless behavior, there will be public accountability and that after a successful completion of a period of supervision, these defendants will have the opportunity to ask that their criminal charges be expunged.”
Image credits: ryanorell/YouTube Shorts
The DA hopes that the accidents underscore the “moral obligation” of social media companies to take action against “dangerous stunts” shared on their platforms.
Speaking with ABC News, a TikTok spokesperson said that content that “promotes dangerous behavior which may lead to serious injury” will be removed from the platform.
“To further discourage such content from being posted or replicated, we redirect related searches such as ‘table surfing’ to our resources support page for online challenges,” they stated.
The video-sharing platform said that between January and March, it proactively took down 99.8% of the videos that violated its “dangerous activities and challenges policy,” with 92.4% of them being identified in time to receive no views.
The incidents involved David Nagy, 17, “surfing” on top of a table tied to a car, and a woman, 20, standing on her friend’s moving vehicle
Image credits: Ahmet Kurt/Unsplash (Not the actual photo)
Image credits: kodiak_boys/Instagram
Both cases are expected to be resolved outside of court, without going to trial.
The dangerous “car surfing” trend is not new. Last year, Fox 13 reported that 15-year-old high school sophomore Ava Broadhead was rushed into brain surgery in Utah after hitting her head on the pavement while “surfing” on top of a moving vehicle.
In 2023, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado warned residents about the challenge following the fatal injuries sustained by a teenager. DCSO also reported that deputies had responded to six calls involving young people engaging in car surfing, as per KDVR.
“I hope others will learn from this,” one commenter wrote, as others blamed TikTok for the tragedies
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