The half-brother of a teen recently killed while subway surfing in Brooklyn wished he had checked the boy’s social media pages, where the youth followed numerous enthusiasts of the deadly stunt.
“Now that you go to his social media, you see who he’s following, who’s his friends,” Alam Reyes’s half-brother, Diego Tinoco, told the Daily News on Monday. “You see the videos people post of subway surfing, you realize now it’s too late.”
Alam, 14, was surfing a Coney Island-bound F train with a friend on Friday when he fell around 2:20 p.m., according to police.
The friend continued on to the next stop and doubled back to Avenue N, where he spoke to police and firefighters, officials said.
Medics responding to the elevated Avenue N station in Midwood above McDonald Ave. pronounced the teen dead at the scene, said cops.
“I spoke to him the day he died,” said Tinoco, 32. “I just said good morning because I was going to work.”
He believes the student at Landmark High School in Chelsea ditched class Friday and chose to subway surf, instead.
“He was a nice kid, he had a lot of friends,” said the sibling. “He just hung out in the wrong circle.”
After Alam’s death, his family members went through his social media feeds and were surprised the teen who had never talked about subway surfing had friends pulling the dangerous stunt and posting it.
“Investigate more on social media to see who they’re following, to see who they’re hanging out with,” Tinoco urged New Yorkers. “It clearly shows his friends were subway surfing. There’s a lot of them. I saw a lot.”
“There’s a lot of kids doing it,” he emphasized. “They’re doing it just for posts.”
Alam lived in Ridgewood, Queens, with his mother, who works multiple jobs to make ends meet, a longtime neighbor said.
“They seem like a good family,” said Sing Goh, 68. “They get up early and come home late.”
While his mother worked, Alam would walk the dogs, sweep the sidewalk and do laundry, according to Goh.
“He doesn’t seem like he would do something like that,” Goh said of subway surfing. “He’s a good kid — maybe it’s bad company.”
The tragedy comes as city officials have been trying to crack down on subway surfing. Last year, the MTA and the mayor’s office launched a campaign urging youths to shun the dangerous trend, and the NYPD has deployed drones to catch subway surfers in the act.