The 12-year-old Brooklyn girl who died while subway surfing in the early hours of Saturday had filled her social media with escalating feats that family members and transit officials now point to as evidence of a perilous appetite for risk that ended on the roof of a J train rolling into Williamsburg. Police, transit authorities and relatives identified the child as Zemfira Mukhtarov, a Bay Ridge eighth grader who was found unresponsive alongside a 13-year-old friend atop a train at the elevated Marcy Avenue–Broadway station just after 3 a.m.; emergency personnel pronounced both girls dead at the scene and opened a standard investigation into a practice New York City Transit has tried, and failed, to stamp out as it spreads through youth circles online.
The outlines were stark and, to officials who have begged teens to stop, heartbreakingly familiar. Officers answering a 911 call arrived to find the pair on the car roof in the station, an endpoint of a ride that police believe began on the line’s run toward the Williamsburg Bridge. Demetrius Crichlow, the president of New York City Transit, said the lesson could not be clearer. “It’s heartbreaking that two young girls are gone because they somehow thought riding outside a subway train was an acceptable game,” he said in a written statement. “Parents, teachers, and friends need to be clear with loved ones: getting on top of a subway car isn’t ‘surfing’—it’s suicide.”
By Tuesday, the New York Police Department had confirmed the victims’ names and ages and fixed the timeline: a 3 a.m. call, a response to Marcy Avenue, two girls—Zemfira, 12, of Brooklyn, and Ebba Morina, 13, of Manhattan—found unresponsive on the roof of a stopped train. The formal confirmation followed a day of confusion that began at a breakfast table in Bay Ridge, where Zemfira’s mother, Nataliya Rudenko, said she watched televised images showing a skateboard and a bag near the scene. “She was supposed to be asleep in her room,” Rudenko told a local reporter. “Now, we’re planning her funeral.”
In interviews with local outlets, family members described a child drawn to adrenaline and to filming herself. Her 11-year-old sister, Maryam, called her “my best friend” and, through tears, turned her remarks outward as a warning. “She was always there for me. She was everything for me,” Maryam said, adding of subway surfing, “It’s just not worth it.” Those sentences, delivered outside the family’s home, were soon woven into a citywide lament that by now has its own vocabulary: a rooftop ride; a station name; and a list of public agencies repeating the same lines about the permanence of the risk and the speed with which a misstep becomes a death.