Two teenagers in Pennsylvania face charges after a 17-year-old died and a 20-year-old suffered permanent “catastrophic head injuries” in incidents linked to dangerous TikTok trends.
Northampton County District Attorney Stephen Baratta announced the charges during a press conference on Tuesday, Sept. 22, noting 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.”
“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,” Baratta said.
In the first case, involuntary manslaughter charges were filed against a 17-year-old male driver over a stunt carried out early on June 1 in the Freedom High School parking lot.
The driver allegedly tied an upside-down folding table to the back of his car with a rope, pulling it across the lot while a 17-year-old friend rode on top. The driver is accused of operating the vehicle recklessly at high speed, which caused the rider to be thrown into another parked car, resulting in his death.
In a separate incident in March, a 19-year-old female driver allegedly allowed her 20-year-old friend to stand on the trunk of her car.
“This 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,” Baratta said. “Unfortunately, the friend was thrown from the moving vehicle and sustained catastrophic head injuries that will be permanent.”
The 19-year-old faces charges including aggravated assault, aggravated assault by vehicle, careless driving, and persons hanging on a vehicle.
Baratta emphasized that although investigations remain open, officials have found no evidence that either driver had “criminogenic thinking.”
“In other words, they were not planning to injure their victim,” he said. “However, in both incidents, the actions of these drivers were so grossly negligent and reckless that it constituted criminal, culpable state of mind.”
He added that the victims’ parents recognized their children had “agreed to participate” in the TikTok challenges.
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“However, 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 said.
“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,” he continued.
Baratta noted both drivers are first-time offenders and that a trial is unlikely.
The teen drivers have not been publicly identified. While the victims’ names have not been released by authorities, Fox News reported that David Nagy, 17, was the teen who died after participating in the table-surfing stunt.
A TikTok spokesperson told ABC News that content “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,” the spokesperson said.
According to TikTok, between January and March, “99.8% of the videos removed for violating TikTok’s dangerous activities and challenges policy were taken down proactively, with 92.4% of them receiving no views.”
