Two teenagers in Pennsylvania have been charged after a 17-year-old died and a 20-year-old sustained permanent “catastrophic head injuries” following participation in dangerous TikTok trends.
Northampton County District Attorney Stephen Baratta announced the charges during a press conference on Tuesday, Sept. 22, emphasizing 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.
Baratta confirmed that involuntary manslaughter charges were filed against a 17-year-old male driver in connection with a challenge that took place in the early hours of June 1 at the Freedom High School parking lot.
The driver is accused of tying an upside-down folding table to the back of his car with a rope and pulling it through the parking lot while a 17-year-old male friend rode atop the table. Authorities say the driver “recklessly operated his vehicle at significant speed,” causing the rider to be thrown into another parked vehicle, resulting in his death.
In a separate incident in March, a 19-year-old female driver allegedly drove her vehicle with her 20-year-old female friend standing on the trunk.
“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 suffered catastrophic head injuries that will be permanent.”
The 19-year-old driver faces charges including aggravated assault, aggravated assault by vehicle, careless driving, and persons hanging on a vehicle.
Baratta noted that, while the investigations are ongoing, officials found that neither driver exhibited “criminogenic thinking.”
“In other words, they were not planning to injure their victim,” Baratta 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 were aware their children had “agreed to participate” in the TikTok challenges.
“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.
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“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 added.
Baratta emphasized that both drivers are first-time offenders and that he does not expect the cases to go to trial.
The teen drivers have not been publicly identified. While authorities have not released the victims’ names, David Nagy, 17, was identified as the teen who died during the table-surfing stunt, according to Fox News.
A TikTok spokesperson told ABC News that content promoting “dangerous behavior which may lead to serious injury” is 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.
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,” the spokesperson added.
