He admitted he once snapped his ankle when he fell into the gangway between cars.
#CALYPSO LEMONADE NEAR ME FREE#
Three of his friends have been arrested for surfing, and another two have died, but “I just feel free doing it,” he said. But that doesn’t deter “Losu,” a 16-year-older surfer from Queens. Those caught subway surfing by the NYPD are usually charged with reckless endangerment. But he knows his one-man campaign is limited. Michael now tells everyone who’s doing it to stop. Over the past eight months, he’s lost Wooden, Fraser, and another friend - Zackery Nazario, a 15-year-old who died in February surfing a train near the Williamsburg Bridge. Most of his close friends also stopped - after Wooden’s death, they briefly changed the name of their group chat to “We Didn’t Die” - mostly out of a sense of relief. Michael quit surfing last December when he woke up to the news that another friend, 15-year-old Ka’Von Wooden, had died surfing that morning. Going through a tunnel on top of a train. (Last year still holds the record of 565 for the same time period.) The rise in numbers has also meant more deaths: Fraser was the fourth teen to die surfing in New York in 2023 there were two last year. This year, the total number of people riding outside the trains in the first six months of 2023 has far outnumbered the 20 totals at 455.
The MTA, which tracks the instances of people riding outside the trains (it does not separately count surfers), saw a noticeable spike in 2021. Some also begin after playing the mobile game Subway Surfers, which simulates the experience. But a new generation of teens is drawn in by the rush of seeing the reactions on TikTok and Instagram. In New York, subway surfing has been around since at least the 1980s. Many also record and share their surfs online, and by the beginning of 2022, the videos began going viral. Some surfers even sprint. Others stand on the ledges of the cars at the back of the train. Most surfers climb to the top of the trains and lie down, kneel, or stand while the cars are moving, even if they’re going as fast as 50 mph. Like many, the 19-year-old began subway surfing in his mid-teens.
#CALYPSO LEMONADE NEAR ME SKIN#
“I’m very grateful I cut this shit out.” As he spoke, he kept tugging on the skin of his throat.
“And we found out who’s next.” He stared at the memorial. “I told everybody, before Jev died, I don’t want to find out who’s next,” says Michael, who declined to share his last name. It had been a month since Fraser fell to his death while riding the top of the 7 train. Next to an empty Calypso Lemonade bottle, a bouquet of flowers, and a Jamaican flag handkerchief, he arranged a smattering of tea candles to spell “JEV.” That was what he and his friends called Jevon Fraser, a 14-year-old teen he knew from surfing the subways. On a steamy July afternoon, Michael knelt beside a makeshift memorial tucked near the wall at the 33rd Street–Rawson Street subway station.
0 kommentar(er)
