A 17-year-old died and a 20-year-old suffered permanent “catastrophic head injuries” while attempting risky social media challenges with their cars, leading to charges against two Pennsylvania teenagers.
Both charges stem from different incidents that happened earlier this year in Pennsylvania.
Stephen Baratta, the District Attorney, stated, “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.”
In the first case, a 17-year-old boy who attempted a social media challenge in the parking lot of Freedom High School was charged with involuntary manslaughter.
A folded table was allegedly tied to the back of the teen’s car with a rope before it was pulled through the parking lot with enough speed to whip the person seated on the table. According to Baratta, the driver allegedly drove his car carelessly at a high enough speed to whip the rider into another parked car, killing the other boy.
The second incident involved a 20-year-old woman who allegedly stood on the trunk of a 19-year-old’s moving car.
which took place near William Penn Highway.
“Unfortunately, the friend was thrown from the moving vehicle and received catastrophic head injuries that will be permanent in nature,” according to Baratta.
The accused 19-year-old driver was charged with reckless driving, aggravated assault by vehicle, and hanging on a car.
Officials determined that neither of the drivers expressed “criminogenic thinking”. They hope that the teenagers can be held accountable; therefore, their charges would be dropped.
He claimed that the accused had no intention of hurting the victim. But in both cases, the driver’s actions were so careless and reckless that they were considered crimes.
The victims’ parents think they had “agreed to participate” in the “social media challenges.”
Baratta clarifies that if found guilty, both drivers would be first-time offenders, and he doesn’t anticipate that there will be a trial.
The identities of the teen drivers and the victims have not been made public. However, WXTE reported the 17-year-old who died had been identified as David Nagy.
A TikTok spokesperson claimed that content that “promotes dangerous behavior which may lead to serious injury” would be removed from the platform.
The spokesperson stated, “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.”
According to the spokesperson, “99.8% of the videos removed for violating TikTok’s dangerous activities and challenges policy were taken down.”
This is something to be mindful of because it can lead to something serious and cause harm to someone.