Before he died, 15-year-old Zackery Nazario was captured on video riding on top of a New York City subway train — a dangerous activity known around the country as “subway surfing.”
Nazario died in February 2023 while attempting the stunt with his girlfriend atop a train crossing the Williamsburg Bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
For his mother, Norma Nazario, the death was as much of a shock as her son’s involvement in subway surfing.
“When I saw him at the funeral, I just fell on my knees,” she recalled. “I couldn’t even get up.”
In the past three years, 16 people have died and 21 have been injured from subway surfing in New York City, according to data from the New York City Police Department.
The problem also extends beyond New York, with fatal subway surfing incidents reported in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
In 2022, the NYPD Transit Bureau and Mayor Eric Adams’ office started using drones to canvass moving trains for subway surfers. Once someone is spotted on top of a train, a field team will hold the train at the next station and remove the individual.
“With this technology, we’re making our transit systems safer, preventing injuries, and ensuring New Yorkers can travel with peace of mind,” Adams said in a statement to CBS News.
Since the program’s inception, the NYPD says it has saved more than 200 people.
NYPD Chief of Transit Joseph Gulotta says that his officers save teens and young adults every week, saying his department is “seeing children subway surfing in the hour before school and then right after school.”
The average subway surfer is just 14 years old, and the youngest child who died was 11, data shows.
“So it became apparent to me that we had to do more,” Gulatta said. “And the drones were the right answer.”
For Gulotta, if “we can change one child from getting on top of the train, this is well worth it.”
One of the drones deployed carries an image of Zackery, allowing him to be a part of the solution.
Social media’s role
After Zackery’s death, Nazario gained access to her son’s phone. She discovered dozens of videos of Zackery riding atop trains, many of which were posted on social media by his friends.
Nazario said she believes her son first discovered subway surfing through trending videos on social media.
“Maybe he watched one video,” she said. “Then he was bombarded with all that.”
Nazario is now suing ByteDance and Meta, the parent companies of TikTok and Instagram, for wrongful death and allowing the trend to go viral.
The suit was filed a year after Zackery’s death and claims that “as a result of the unreasonably dangerous design of Social Media Defendants’ products,” he “was targeted, goaded and encouraged to engage in Subway Surfing.”
Spokespeople for both ByteDance and Meta told CBS News that videos encouraging subway surfing violate the platforms’ policies and are removed.
A Meta spokesperson added the company “will vigorously defend ourselves against this suit.”
Nazario also brought a claim against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which was dismissed in June 2025 by Judge Paul Goetz, who ruled that the “risk and danger” of subway surfing “are obvious as a matter of common sense.”
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