Pink light bathed the closed white casket of 13-year-old Ebba Morina, one of two young girls who died surfing atop a Brooklyn subway, as her grief-stricken family received a steady flow of mourners.
Atop the casket sat a huge, circular flower arrangement, while a slideshow played photos of the Upper East Side teen from infancy to adolescence.
The youngster’s family gathered Tuesday night at the Farenga Brothers Funeral Home in the Bronx, where more than a hundred mourners poured into the viewing room, and another two dozen or so gathered in a second room next door.
“It’s a terrible tragedy, she was a wonderful girl,” said one relative, who declined to give his name.
Ebba and her 12-year-old friend Zemfira Mukhtarov, became the latest in a wave of shockingly young risk-seekers to meet a grisly end riding atop a city subway.
Oct. 7, 2025: Surf shock on subway
New York Daily News Front page for Oct. 7, 2025: 12-year-old set to bake brownies with dad dies on train. Ruslan Mukhtarov with his daughter Zemfira, who sneaked out of their Brooklyn home hours before they were to have baked brownies, and tragically died subway surfing with a 13-year-old friend.
The two girls were riding atop a Queens-bound J train across the Williamsburg Bridge early Saturday, when both suffered fatal head injuries, apparently struck by a low-hanging beam as they crossed the span. They were found sprawled out on top of the last car of a J train after it entered the Marcy Ave. subway stop at Broadway.
Before her death, Zemfira posed nerve-wracking videos of herself on her now-deleted Tiktok profile, one of her walking across a narrow beam as a subway rushes underneath her, another from the perspective of her laying on the tracks, while a train barrels just inches above her.
Their deaths come after a string of subway-surfing fatalities and injuries over the past two years, and authorities believe the trend is being fueled by social media one-upsmanship.
The trend hasn’t been slowed by a series of public service announcements and comic-book style subway ads, including messages by Cardi B and 38-year-old BMX bicycle pro Nigel Alexander. The NYPD has also launched drones to try to catch the perpetrators in the act.
On July 4, a 15-year-old boy died riding atop No. 7 train entering the Queensboro Plaza station. On June 16, a 14-year-old boy was critically injured when he fell from a northbound No. 5 train near the Baychester Ave. stop in the Bronx and landed on the track bed. And in Brooklyn, a 13-year-old boy was hospitalized with minor head injuries after falling from the top of an R train heading into the Bay Ridge Ave. station on March 17.
The city has seen five subway surfing deaths this year, compared to six in 2024 and five in 2023, according to NYPD statistics.
