The heartbroken family of a 14-year-old Brooklyn boy who died falling off the train while subway surfing over the Williamsburg Bridge has a message for anyone considering the stunt:
“Just stop! Stop!” Sharean Butler begged on Sunday. Butler helped raise the victim, Akhi Butler, who is her cousin’s son.
Social media clout isn’t worth your life, Butler said.
“You can get that somehow, someway, another way that’s more safer,” she said. “That is not it at all. And most of the times it ends up tragically.”
Akhi and an 18-year-old boy were found unconscious on the roadbed of the J and M lines on the Williamsburg Bridge around 6:50 p.m. Friday, according to police. Akhi died at the scene while the survivor is in currently in critical condition at Bellevue Hospital.
“It’s very hard,” said Butler. “We’ve all got heavy hearts right now … I’ve been lost for words since we heard this.”
Akhi’s mother is “heartbroken” over her first-born child’s senseless death, Butler said.
“A tragedy like this never really struck the family where we lost a teenage,” she said. “A baby. That’s her son!”
GoFundMe
Akhi Butler, 14, died in a subway surfing incident on the Williamsburg Bridge on Friday, police said. (GoFundMe)
The family is still trying to understand how this could have happened.
“I’m still questioning about this,” Butler said. “I don’t even know the whole story. I’m hearing bits and pieces.”
She wondered if peer pressure could have played a role.
“That was my concern, she said. “An 18-year-old was with a 14-year-old? Was he pressured? … But I don’t know much on it, so I can’t touch on it.”
Butler called subway surfing a “dangerous cycle” that has been “going on for years.”
“This was a thing when I was even at school,” she said.
Social media and TikTok have made the problem worse, Akhi’s relatives believe.
The victim’s 23-year-old cousin, who asked that his name not be used, is reeling from the tragedy.
“The subway surfing thing, my opinion, I think these kids just want to do it for the thrill, for the moment, to go viral,” the cousin said.
“Social media nowadays, everybody want to be watched … You’re risking your life, bro.”
Shutterstock
Subway trains cross the Williamsburg Bridge. (Shutterstock)
Akhi was “bubbly” and “energetic,” with lots of active hobbies, including playing football and the drums.
With the summer approaching he was excited to hit the pool at St. John’s Recreation Center, across the street from the Crown Heights apartment where he lived with his mom and two younger siblings in the Albany Houses.
“He loved swimming. He loved the rec center,” Butler said. “That was one of his favorite go-to places, especially in the summertime.”
Relatives have launched a GoFundMe to raise money for Akhi’s funeral.
Trains rumbling over the Williamsburg Bridge pass under a series of low-hanging beams, making it an especially hazardous location for an already dangerous activity.
“It’s a notorious hotspot spot. I nicknamed it the ‘Death Bridge,’” said Michael, a former subway surfer who has since stopped. “Low beams get everybody.”
Michael, 21, said he gave up subway surfing in 2023 after his friend, 15-year-old Zachary Nazario, was killed riding a train over the same span where Akhi went down.
In a similar incident last Oct. 4, two girls were found dead sprawled atop the last car of a J train after it crossed the Williamsburg Bridge and rolled into the Marcy Ave. station around 3:10 a.m. Each had suffered a severe head injury, apparently having been struck by a low-hanging beam on the bridge. One of the girls, 12-year-old Zemfira Mukhtarov, was supposed to make brownies with her dad but sneaked out of the house instead, the grieving father told The News at the time.
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
The Williamsburg Bridge. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images)
NYC Transit President Demetrius Crichlow, in a statement Friday pleaded for people to keep teens from doing the “suicidal stunts.”
“This is heartbreaking and knowing that riding outside trains is going to end tragically, it’s incomprehensible — and pains me as a parent — that it continues to happen,” Crichlow said.
Over the past several months, cops and the MTA have taken a multiprong approach to discourage thrill seekers.
Last June, the MTA ramped up its “Ride Inside and Stay Alive” campaign featuring Queens-born BMX athlete Nigel Sylvester. The NYPD also began flying drones over aboveground subway lines to keep an eye out for subway surfers.
