A 13-year-old boy who died last week after subway surfing on a Bronx train was a victim of peer pressure, his grieving mother said.
Gerard Ashitey was killed Friday morning after falling from a northbound No. 6 train at the Middletown Road station in Pelham Bay, according to police.
His mom, who didn’t want her name published, thinks his friends put him up to it.
“Absolutely,” she said Monday. “He never would have done it otherwise.”
She described her son as a regular teenager who would have “never” done anything like subway surging on his own.
“He was an adventurous kid. He liked to try different things,” she said. “He is adventurous in that he wants to try new things, new games. He is not adventurous like that.
Gerard’s idea of adventure was “taking this apart and fixing it,” the grieving parent said, pointing to a box fan. “Not stuff like that.”
Her son was a good kid with good grades, she said, so she and her husband didn’t worry about him.
The Bronx boy got in trouble once last year during his first year in middle school after he and several classmates cut class and sneaked off to Times Square, she said.
“We talked to him,” she said. “The principal talked to him about the consequences of his actions. He doesn’t have to follow his friends. He has to be in school. That’s why we are here. He has to be careful. I always talk to him. I say you have to choose the right path, that there are consequences to everything you do.”
Even with Gerard’s good grades, she could get past him skipping school for a day, she said.
But not this.
“When they called me on Friday I wasn’t expecting it,” she said. “I was so devastated.”
Another teen was seriously injured hours earlier in a separate subway surfing incident.
At 1:40 a.m. Friday, a 15-year-old was badly hurt while surfing on another northbound No. 6 train at the Morris Ave.-Soundview station in the Bronx, police said. Medics rushed the victim to Jacobi Hospital in critical condition.
Through last Friday, there have been 104 subway surfing incidents this year, with two killed, five others hurt and 99 arrested, police said.
The MTA last September enlisted students in a public safety awareness campaign to discourage kids and teens from riding atop subway cars or on their sides.
Two months later, the NYPD started using drones to spot surfers and call ahead to motormen so they could stop the train.
Gerard’s parents, who immigrated from Ghana before Gerard and his two younger siblings were born, launched a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for his funeral expenses. His mother said she hopes other teens learn from this tragedy.
“They have to be very careful,” she said. “Peer pressure is a very bad thing. Everything has consequences. Gerard made a mistake and now he is gone. Life is worth it.”
