Two teenagers have been charged over a TikTok prank that sent a 16-year-old boy falling 50 meters into a canal on the Queensboro Bridge, as the victim’s loved ones say his so-called friends left him there to die.
A 14-year-old boy and a 15-year-old boy were arrested and charged in connection with an alleged misdemeanor Monday night, an NYPD spokeswoman said Thursday.
The juvenile was charged with reckless endangerment and burglary, while the older boy was charged with trespassing, police said.
Police responded to a 911 call at the end of the Queens bridge around 5:45 p.m. Monday and found a 16-year-old boy from Lynbrook, Long Island stuck inside the sinkhole, police said.
Sources told The Post that the boy was taking a picture to post on TikTok when he fell.
It took about 75 first responders and 10 instruments to rescue the boy, said FDNY Deputy Chief Nicholas Corrado at a press conference at the scene.
He was taken to New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell, where he was listed in critical but stable condition, police said.
An online petition calling for the suspect to be investigated says that two of the boy’s “friends” took videos of the boy, identified as “Frankie,” while he was shouting their names in “pain” and sent them to people on the Internet.
“No one deserves to be abandoned and left to die at the worst and most painful time in their life,” the Change.org petition said.
The petition, which has more than 1,000 signatures, alleges that two friends managed to take the injured boy’s mobile phone to prevent him from calling 911 and fled the scene to their homes – leaving the boy “inside the bridge hole suffering and dying.”
“Several hours later, an unidentified woman who saw the video contacted authorities,” the petition added. “The FDNY had to search every lane of the Queensboro Bridge until they found Frankie’s shoe and blood.”
A GoFundMe for Frankie’s recovery costs said the boy had high fever and lost a lot of blood during the terrifying fall, and “now faces a long road of surgery, recovery, and rehabilitation.”
“His survival is a miracle,” said his family’s fundraiser.
TikTok has come under fire in recent years for allowing a series of potentially dangerous incidents to be widely shared and live on the social media platform.
