Two teens have been charged in connection with a foolish TikTok stunt that caused a 16-year-old boy to plummet 50 feet and become trapped inside a shaft on the Queensboro Bridge, as the victim’s loved ones alleged his so-called friends left him there to die.
A 14-year-old boy and a 15-year-old boy have been arrested and charged for their alleged roles in the boneheaded stunt gone wrong on Monday evening, an NYPD spokesperson said on Thursday.
The younger teen has been charged with reckless endangerment and criminal trespassing, and the older boy with criminal trespassing, cops said.
Officers responded to a 911 call on the Queens end of the East River bridge around 5:45 p.m. Monday and found the 16-year-old from Lynbrook, Long Island stuck inside the shaft, police said.
Sources told The Post the boy was filming a stunt to post on TikTok when he fell.
Roughly 75 first responders and 10 pieces of apparatus were needed to rescue the boy, FDNY Deputy Chief Nicholas Corrado said at a press briefing at the scene
He was rushed to New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell, where he was listed in critical but stable condition, police said.
An online petition urging for the stunt to be investigated alleged that two of the teen’s “friends” took videos of the boy, identified as “Frankie,” as he screamed their names “in agony” and sent them to people online.
“Nobody deserves to be abandoned and left to die during the worst and most traumatic moment of their life,” the Change.org petition said.
The petition, which has over 1,000 signatures, alleged that the two pals managed to take the wounded teen’s cell phone to prevent him from calling emergency services and fled the scene to their homes — leaving the boy “inside the bridge shaft suffering and dying.”
“Multiple hours later, an anonymous woman who saw the video contacted authorities,” the petition added. “The FDNY had to search each shaftway of the Queensboro Bridge until they found Frankie’s shoe and blood.”
A GoFundMe for Frankie’s recovery costs said the teen was hypothermic and lost a lot of blood during the terrifying fall, and “now faces a long road of surgeries, recovery, and rehabilitation.”
“His survival is nothing short of a miracle,” the fundraiser for his family said.
TikTok has come under attack in recent years for allowing a string of possibly dangerous stunts to be widely shared and remain on the social media platform.
