After partaking in a dangerous TikTok trend, Pennsylvania police have charged two teens after a 17-year-old died and a 20-year-old sustained permanent “catastrophic head injuries.” According to PEOPLE, Northampton County District Attorney Stephen Baratta revealed the county had been recently investigating these reckless “stunt challenges” in a news conference on September 23.
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Two Teens Charged After TikTok Trend Kills Teen And Leaves Another With Permanent Injuries
“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,” said Baratta.
They first charged one 17-year-old with involuntary manslaughter after attempting a dangerous social media challenge. In June, the teen allegedly tied an upside-down folding table with a rope to the back of his vehicle. While in the Freedom High School parking lot, he pulled the table while a 17-year-old male friend rode on top of it.
Baratta alleged that the teen driver “recklessly operated his vehicle at significant speed such that it whipped the rider sitting on the table into another parked vehicle.” This resulted in his friend’s death.
In a separate incident back in March, Baratta said a 19-year-old female was allegedly driving while her 20-year-old female friend tried to “surf” on top of the trunk of the moving car. This was also in a parking lot, this time near William Penn Highway.
As you can guess, this didn’t end well. “Unfortunately, the friend was thrown from the moving vehicle and received catastrophic head injuries that will be permanent in nature,” said Baratta.
Since then, police have charged the driver with aggravated assault, aggravated assault by vehicle, careless driving, and persons hanging on a vehicle. Despite these hefty charges, Baratta confirmed that these were accidents, and neither of the drivers intended to do harm.
“They were not planning to injure their victim,” Baratta explained. “However, in both incidents, the action of these drivers were so grossly negligent and reckless that it constituted criminal, culpable state of mind.”
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Baratta believes these two incidents are connected. Both victims’ parents claimed their children “agreed to participate” in some kind of TikTok challenge.
“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,” Baratta continued.
Although officials have yet to identify the teen drivers publicly, WXTF identified the 17-year-old boy who died as David Nagy. His obituary described him as “bright, kind, and wise beyond his years.”
A TikTok spokesperson spoke with ABC News about the horrifying incidents. They said that they would remove any content that “promotes dangerous behavior which may lead to serious injury” from their 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,” they said.