MoxBlog

This photo is from a different car surfing incident in 2010.

True to its name, the Dunes Off Highway Vehicle Recreation Area, 1.5 miles south of Farmington, N.M., offers a barren, hilly landscape with no paved roads to be found.

Bordered on one side by sharply rising sandstone walls, on another by a gravel pit and dotted with active gas wells, the area is an adrenaline junkie’s dream — 800 acres of beige sand dunes rising out of deep arroyos, waiting to fling off-road vehicles into the air.

That’s likely the experience 21-year-old Wilberta Anna Becenti was chasing when she traveled down from her hometown of Nageezi, N.M.

Driving over the rough dirt roughs while an off-road vehicle’s shocks absorb the impact can be electrifying, but Becenti and her friends took things a step further.

After drinking alcohol to the point of intoxication, the 21 year-old decided to double the thrill by climbing on top of the car.

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Conditions were already dangerous. At 4:30 a.m. local time, the dunes were invisible in the inky blackness of predawn.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, drivers are allowed to traverse the trails at night so long as their headlights can “light an object 300 feet” away,” but alcohol is expressly prohibited.

After she climbed onto the car’s roof, tragedy struck. At some point, she was flung from the car into the darkness. The fall killed her.

Lt. Kyle Lincoln, a San Juan County Sheriff’s Office detective, said it’s unclear at this time if the driver was also intoxicated, and no charges have been filed as of early Wednesday morning, according to The Daily Times.

“I’m going to miss you so much Berta you were one of my best friends and I’m glad I was one of yours and you were more than willing to open up,” wrote Jose Montelongo on Facebook, WNCN reported. “I’ll never forget the good memories we had together. I’m sorry. Sorry to the family and everyone else affected by this tragic accident.”

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Tragic as the accident is, it’s not particularly uncommon, especially among young people seeking a cheap thrill. In fact, it may be more common than ever.

Climbing onto the roof of a moving car is a practice called “car surfing,” and it has claimed seven young lives so far this year and injured countless others.

According to a 2008 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the term “car surfing” actually originated as far back as the mid-1980s and caused 58 deaths between 1990 to August 2008 — an average of 3 per year. These were mostly among teenage males living in the Midwest and American South.

The deaths spiked in the mid-90s, then again around 2000.

By then car surfing received a new nickname: “ghost riding the whip,” and it became something of a pop culture phenomenon.

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Video gamers could experience it through the digital version of Xzibit’s popular “Pimp My Ride,” and the dangerous practice was heavily featured in Oakland rapper E-40’s hit “Tell Me When to Go” and later in “Ghost Ride It” by fellow Oakland rapper Mistah F.A.B.

MTV banned the video for”Ghost Ride It” after a slew of deaths resulting from car surfing occurred, the Mercury News reported in 2007, but the practice had already become popular across the U.S.

As The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi wrote in 2006:

“Ghost–riding the whip,” as it’s known, has swept from its origins in San Francisco’s East Bay to much of the rest of the country, propelled by a pair of hip-hop songs that celebrate this exceptionally dangerous regional tradition.

To ghost-ride, the driver climbs out of the car while it’s moving at low speed. The ghost-rider then busts a move around and on top of the vehicle, usually accompanied by a thumping soundtrack from the car (or “whip,” in urban slang). ... It’s all about self- expression. Or possibly cheap thrills. Or maybe the ever-popular youthful flirtation with bone-breaking, brain-damaging injury. A young man in Stockton, Calif., for example, died this month when he hit his head on a parked car while attempting what police said was a ghost–riding maneuver, according to news reports.

Ghost–riding videos are all over the Web, displaying a vast array of dance styles and vehicles. On YouTube, the most popular video-sharing site, clips abound of young people climbing out of cars, trucks and minivans, dancing frantically on hoods, trunks and even roofs.

This year has seen the death of the toothy, wide-eyed 11-year-old Anthony Baldonado of Albuquerque, after he fell from the back of a Jeep Grand Cherokee, KRQE reported. It, too, was called a “tragic accident.”

Gianni Fabian Garcia, 15, was killed when he fell from the back of a Chevy Camaro driven by his friend in March.

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Another 15-year-old, a young woman named Ronte Nelson-Goins, was killed when she fell from the top of her cousin’s truck in Homewood, Pa., in February.

After 19-year-old Coloradan Brandon Lovett died in June after falling while car surfing, his second cousin Monica Dengler spoke to the Daily Sentinel.

“Please, please think twice on doing this or something similar that may seem like fun ... it’s not,” she said. “It could cost them their life.”

Lovett’s brother Tyrone echoed the sentiment.

“We as people need to learn from my brother’s mistake and my brother’s loss. He died being reckless and just having fun.”

Minnesota resident Andrew Green, 17, learned this difficult lesson firsthand, after a car surfing accident in April. He spent a month in a medically induced coma and had part of his skull removed. As he told KMSP, he now suffers such severe headaches, lifting his head from the pillow is a challenge.

“If I ever have the chance to tell someone or stop someone, I want to take that chance. I don’t want anyone to end up like this, and there is a possibility they could end up even worse than this,” Green said.

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