Badrinarayan Hungund was riding an electric scooter to a nearby friend’s house in Northern Virginia late last month when the young boy collided with a minivan.

Riding an electric scooter along K Street NW in Washington in 2019. As e-scooters become more popular, doctors say they’ve seen a sharp increase in injuries, including among children. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

The 9-year-old, who police said was not wearing a helmet, died. The driver of the vehicle was not at fault, Fairfax police said.

One day later, a 5-year-old boy on an e-scooter was seriously injured in a hit-and-run in Southeast Washington, D.C. police said. No one has been charged in that case.

As e-scooters and electric bikes become more popular, doctors and researchers say they’ve seen a sharp increase in injuries related to the vehicles, including among children, in recent years.

Mary Beth Howard, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, said she once treated seven kids for e-scooter injuries during an eight-hour shift. In her experience, she said, extremity injuries, such as broken bones, as well as head injuries, were most common in incidents related to e-scooters.

“We are seeing these injuries come in more frequently, and we’re also seeing the severity increase,” Howard said.

Howard co-authored a March paper that found there were 2,117 pediatric e-scooter injuries between 2020 and 2024 in the United States captured in the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which includes a nationally representative sample of emergency departments. “The true number of children injured on e-scooters in the United States is certainly higher,” she said.

Badrinarayan, who would have started fifth grade this fall, liked playing soccer and chess, Venkata Pola, a close friend of his family, said in an interview.

Pola said Badrinarayan usually wore a helmet but suspects that on the day of the crash, the boy didn’t think he would be riding the scooter for long enough to warrant wearing one.

The Washington Post was unable to reach Hungund’s parents because, Pola said, they returned to India to remember their son with family.

“He’s one of the best kids in the community,” said Pola, who added that their two families were like one. “I’m still trying to come out of the trauma.”

More rides mean more injuries

Ridership of electric scooters and bicycles has grown across the country and locally over the past decade. More than 130 U.S. cities, including Washington, offered ride-share e-scooter systems in 2025, according to the Department of Transportation.

In the District, there were more than 3.8 million e-scooter trips during the first six months of 2026, according to city data. By comparison, there were about 140,000 e-scooter trips during the same period in 2019.

Across North America, shared micromobility ridership in 2024 grew 31 percent, reaching a new high with at least 225 million trips, including nearly 85 million e-scooter trips, according to the North American Bikeshare and Scootershare Association.

Cheap, imported e-scooters can easily be bought online and are sometimes seen as toys. As e-scooters and e-bikes have become more common, so, too, have injuries.

In 2025, DC Health recorded 97 injuries among people up to age 20 on scooters of all types in the District, compared with 51 injuries two years earlier. So far this year, the agency has documented 82 scooter-related injuries for people age 0 to 20.

Between 2017 and 2024, there were an estimated 698,500 total emergency department visits across the United States linked to e-scooters, e-bikes, and self-balancing scooters and hoverboards, rising from 37,300 in 2017 to 149,100 in 2024, according to an April report by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. E-scooters accounted for about 380,000 of those total visits.

The report also documented 533 fatalities related to these devices over the seven-year-period. E-bikes were linked to 58 percent of those deaths, while e-scooters were tied to about 39 percent.

Of those killed in e-scooter accidents, two were children under the age of 5, and nine were between the ages of 5 and 14.

Through media reports, The Post also identified at least six other minors killed in e-scooter accidents around the United States between 2024 and this year.

In 2025, an 8-year-old in California was trapped under a car and killed while riding an e-scooter. That same year, a 10-year-old and a 9-year-old were struck by a vehicle while riding an e-scooter together in Las Vegas; the elder child died, and the younger one was injured.

In May in Florida, a 13-year-old was hit by a vehicle and killed while riding an e-scooter. The next month, a 13-year-old was killed while riding an e-scooter when he was struck by a vehicle in New York City.

Howard, the pediatric emergency medicine physician, said a combination of factors explains why kids keep getting hurt or killed riding e-scooters. They may not have much experience operating a vehicle, she said. Children also tend to be less familiar with traffic rules, and they don’t have the coordination to control what are often heavy e-scooters, she added.

Young children, along with older adults, are most likely to sustain a serious injury when struck by a vehicle, according to Katherine Harmon, who researches active travel injuries at the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center.

“With children, they’re smaller. They’re lighter,” she said. “They’re more likely to go airborne.”

‘Please have your kids wear helmets’

On July 23, officers responded to the Herndon area of Fairfax County around 5:30 p.m. following reports that a 9-year-old boy had been struck by a vehicle, police said. Preliminary indications showed that as a minivan entered a townhouse community, the boy hit the rear passenger side of the vehicle, police said.

The 9-year-old was riding a Volpam Q1 scooter, according to police; authorities have not said how fast he was traveling. That scooter model can go up to 16 mph, according to a description on the company’s website. The description also says the scooter is “designed for adults.”

Following the incident, police urged parents to make sure their kids are safe when playing outside. “Please have your kids wear helmets. Teach them the basic safety rules. Keep an eye on them,” Fairfax police Capt. Chris Cosgriff said at a news briefing after the crash.

The next day, at about 6:45 p.m., D.C. police officers responded to a parking lot in a residential community in Southeast Washington, near Congress Heights. A preliminary investigation determined that the driver of a dark-blue Nissan with Virginia plates was traveling at a high speed when they struck a 5-year-old boy riding a children’s e-scooter, police said.

DC Fire took the boy to a local hospital for treatment for life-threatening injuries, police said. The driver fled the scene, and an arrest has not been made, police added.

One week later, neighborhood residents were still reeling from the crash.

Malik Utley said lots of kids play outside in the neighborhood. “That could have been my kid,” Utley said; he has a 4-year-old son.

Despite the children outside, Mira Johnson said, drivers tend to speed through the neighborhood.

“If they put speed humps right here, it’ll help them slow down,” said Johnson, who has two daughters, a 9-month-old and a 6-year-old. “Safety is not enforced in this community like it should be,” she added.

A spokesperson for the District’s Department of Transportation said that the incident occurred in a private parking area, outside the agency’s roadway jurisdiction, and that an agency review found no traffic safety investigation requests, pending inspections, work orders or active DDOT projects on the street.

“The safety concerns of residents are important to DDOT,” the spokesperson said. “DDOT welcomes additional information about concerns on specific public streets or blocks in the surrounding neighborhood.”

In D.C., riders must be at least 18 years old to rent an e-scooter, according to DDOT, but District law says riders must be at least 16 to ride a personal e-scooter. Rental e-scooters are capped at 10 mph in the city for safety reasons, according to DDOT. (In Virginia, riders must be at least 14 to ride an e-scooter unsupervised.)

Despite those age restrictions, D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), who chairs the transportation committee, said he’s concerned that kids are continuing to ride e-scooters around the city.

“They’re heavier, they’re faster, and there’s less margin for error,” he said. “There’s a reason why kids are not supposed to be operating e-bikes and e-scooters.”

The District offers two-year permits to scooter companies, a process that will begin again in the fall, according to Allen. He said he wanted to learn more about how the companies are working to restrict minors from renting e-scooters.

“It gives us an opportunity to be very focused on safety,” he said. “That’s the opportunity, frankly, where we get to set the terms.”