Akhi Dwayne Jones Butler was 14 when he fell to his death on the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge while riding on top of a J train, the first subway surfing death of 2026. An 18-year-old in the same incident was critically injured. And almost everyone working to stop the next one agrees on what is pulling kids onto the roofs of trains, which is the part the city cannot simply arrest its way out of.
The NYPD has the enforcement numbers, and they show the limit of enforcement. The department says it has stopped 650 subway surfers since 2022 and 83 this year alone, and Chief of Transit Joseph Gulotta says officers track the same faces, more than 60 repeat offenders over five years, some carrying stolen MTA keys to get where they should not be. Pulling a teenager off the tracks once, it turns out, does not keep them off.
What officials keep pointing at instead is the feed. MTA chief executive Janno Lieber has gone at the platforms directly, saying subway surfing videos do get to live for too long on Instagram and that if the same companies wanted to take them down, they could: if it were child pornography, he said, they would figure out how to shut it down. The clips are the reward, and the reward is what keeps the behavior alive.
The hardest pushback is coming from a parent. Norma Nazario, whose 15-year-old son Zackery died subway surfing over the same bridge in 2023, has been hired by the NYPD as a community coordinator, speaking to students and to the families of repeat offenders. She has also taken the platforms to court. The Social Media Victims Law Center filed a wrongful death suit on her behalf against Meta, TikTok, ByteDance and the MTA, and a Manhattan judge let the case proceed against the social media companies while dropping the MTA from the suit, finding it plausible their role went beyond neutrally promoting content, according to reporting by Gothamist on the ruling.
That is the uncomfortable shape of this story. The city has tried the obvious tools, more officers, more outreach, a grieving mother on the payroll, and the deaths keep coming because the thing driving them is an algorithm that rewards the most dangerous version of the clip. Subway surfing is being treated, by the people closest to it, less as a policing failure than as a design choice made in Menlo Park.
If you have a teenager, the people doing this work say the conversation at home matters more than any enforcement sweep, and the families who have lost kids are the ones leading it. If subway-surfing videos are being pushed to young users you know, report them inside the app and to the platform directly, which is exactly the inaction Nazario’s lawsuit is trying to force a court to address. The NYPD’s transit outreach, the program Nazario now works for, is aimed at reaching kids before the next ride, not after.
Featured image: Jack and Dianne / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
