TikTok Trends Leave Teen Dead and 20-Year-Old with ‘Catastrophic Head Injuries’

Two teenagers in Pennsylvania have been charged after a 17-year-old was left dead and a 20-year-old was left with permanent ‘catastrophic head injuries’ following dangerous TikTok trends.

Northampton County District Attorney Stephen Baratta announced the charges in a press conference on Tuesday, Sept. 22, expressing 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,” said Baratta.

According to Baratta, involuntary manslaughter charges were brought against a male juvenile driver, age 17, regarding a challenge held during the early morning of June 1 at the Freedom High School parking lot.

The driver is accused of using a rope to tie an upside-down folding table to the back of his automobile and then pulling that table through the parking lot while a juvenile male friend, also aged 17, rode sitting on top of the table.

The driver is said to have “recklessly operated his vehicle at significant speed such that it whipped the rider sitting on the table into another parked vehicle,” resulting in the rider’s death.

In a separate incident in March, a 19-year-old female driver allegedly operated her vehicle while her 20-year-old female friend stood 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,” said Baratta. “Unfortunately, the friend was thrown from the moving vehicle and received catastrophic head injuries that will be permanent in nature.”

The 19-year-old driver faces charges including aggravated assault, aggravated assault by vehicle, careless driving, and persons hanging on a vehicle.

Baratta said that while the investigations in both cases remain open, officials have determined that neither of the young drivers in the cases had “criminogenic thinking.”

“In other words, they were not planning to injure their victim,” said Baratta. “However, in both incidents, the action of these drivers were so grossly negligent and reckless that it constituted criminal, culpable state of mind.”

He noted that the parents of the victims understood that 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,” said Baratta.

“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,” said Baratta.

He noted that both drivers are first-time offenders and that he does not anticipate that there will be a trial.

The teen drivers have not been identified publicly. While the victims have also not been named by authorities, David Nagy, 17, was identified as the victim who died after taking part in a table surfing stunt, per Fox News.

A TikTok spokesperson told ABC News that content that “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 told ABC News.

According to the spokesperson, 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.”

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PEOPLE has reached out to the Northampton County District Attorney’s Office and TikTok for comment.