A 13-year-old boy was seriously injured Tuesday evening after he lost control of an electric dirt bike and was thrown near Watermelon Hill Road and Eleanor Drive in Mahopac, police said. The crash happened around 7:30 p.m. when the boy struck an object along the side of the road, possibly a bush, according to investigators.
Responding officers and emergency medical crews arrived to find the boy with serious injuries, according to DailyVoice.com. He was treated at the scene before being airlifted to a regional trauma center for further care. As of Wednesday, Carmel Police said no additional information about his condition was available.
Detectives Piece Together What Led to the Crash
Detectives are investigating the circumstances leading up to the crash, though the exact details of how the boy lost control remain under review. Carmel Police is also working with the local school district to provide support to those affected by the crash, signaling the incident has rippled beyond the immediate scene on Watermelon Hill Road.
The Mahopac stretch where the crash occurred isn't unfamiliar to reports of off-road vehicles on public streets. In November 2024, the Mahopac School District Transportation Office reported an ATV and dirt bike driving recklessly on Baldwin Place Road near Mahopac High School, an incident that led to an arrest, the outlet's report on that case noted.
A Nationwide Spike in Injuries Among Young Riders
The Mahopac crash lands amid a broader surge in e-bike and e-scooter injuries among children and teens. Truveta found a 7.5-fold increase in injury rates for young riders since 2023, according to NPR. Doctors interviewed by the outlet described the severity of what they're seeing in emergency rooms. “We have seen really severe traumatic brain injuries,” one physician told NPR, adding that facial fractures, orthopedic fractures and even deaths have followed similar crashes.
Mass General Brigham for Children reported seeing patients with these injuries multiple times a week, with more cases logged this year than during all of last year combined, per the same NPR report. Many of these injuries occur when riders are thrown from the device and try to break their fall with an outstretched hand, according to the Times Union. That outlet also reported that emergency rooms around its region have seen a rise in such injuries among children and teens, and that Albany Medical Center has noted an uptick in cases over the past year, including concussions among riders not wearing helmets.
Data Shows Hospital Admissions Climbing Sharply
The scale of the trend shows up starkly in hospital data. Micromobility-related hospital admissions at Stony Brook Children's increased by more than 900 percent between 2023 and 2025, according to Stony Brook Medicine. By 2025, e-bikes and e-scooters accounted for 30 percent of all pediatric trauma emergency responses at that hospital.
A national analysis of pediatric emergency-department injuries from 2005 through 2024 found fractures were the most common injury type in e-bike cases, making up 27 percent of them, according to Contemporary Pediatrics. That same analysis found e-bike injuries carried a 6.6 percent hospital admission rate, compared with 5 percent for traditional bicycle injuries and 10 percent for gas-powered-cycle injuries. Separately, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has reported that children 14 and younger accounted for about 36 percent of micromobility injuries between 2017 and 2022.
Similar crashes have played out elsewhere in recent months. A 15-year-old boy was taken to the hospital after being struck by an SUV while riding an electric dirt bike in North Tonawanda, according to WIVB. In Ashburn, Virginia, two 14-year-olds were seriously injured when the electric dirt bike they were riding collided with an SUV, WJLA reported.
For now, the Mahopac investigation continues, with detectives still working to determine exactly what happened in the moments before the boy lost control. Carmel Police has not released further updates on his condition since Wednesday.
