The murder of Iryna Zarutska is layers upon layers of awful tragedy. The 23-year-old woman fled her home country of Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in 2022, seeking refuge in North Carolina. Instead of finding safety, she was brutally murdered while riding the train in Charlotte, N.C.
One particularly shocking element is that the whole incident was caught on CCTV. On August 22nd, Zarutska can be seen getting on the train at around 10pm, having just finished her shift at Zepeddie’s Pizzeria. She takes a seat in front of the murder suspect, 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr., and scrolls through her phone. Just four minutes later, the suspect takes what looks to be a pen knife from his hoodie pocket, and stabs Zarutska three times, at least once in the neck. The attack appeared to be entirely random. Victim and suspect did not know each other. They had shared no interaction on the train prior to this. Zarutska was simply minding her own business, trying to get home from work at the end of the day. For this scene to go so quickly from ordinary commute to senseless murder is the stuff of nightmares.
Then there was the fact that Brown was known to the authorities—that dreaded phrase we see come up time and again in cases like these. Brown, who is currently homeless, has spent most of his life in and out of prison, having appeared in court no fewer than 14 times. He previously served a five-year sentence for armed robbery, and was arrested again for assaulting his sister, just months after being released in 2020. He also has a history of mental-health issues and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Earlier this year, he was charged with abusing the 911 emergency number, when he called to complain that he had “man-made” material inside his body, which he believed was controlling his movements.
Why was this man, who had consistently proved to be a danger to himself and others, allowed to walk the streets freely? I am reminded of a similar case here in the UK, also involving a dangerous, severely mentally ill man who the authorities failed to properly treat and restrain. In 2023, Valdo Calocane randomly began attacking passersby in central Nottingham, killing three people—two 19-year-old students, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber, and 65-year-old school caretaker Ian Coates. Like Brown, Calocane was known to the authorities and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was supposed to be in the care of the NHS, but kept refusing treatment, because he was afraid of needles. Nobody involved seemed all that concerned with ensuring that Calocane actually received the antipsychotic medication he needed. The cost of this carelessness and apathy was three people’s lives.
In another, eerily similar case from Germany last month, 16-year-old Liana K.—also a refugee from Ukraine—was killed when she was randomly pushed in front of a moving train. The suspect is believed to be a failed Iraqi asylum seeker, who was supposed to have been deported years ago. Once again, the suspect was also suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Like Zarutska, Liana and her family had fled to Germany, believing they would be safe there. Instead, the authorities’ failure to enforce the law resulted in a 16-year-old’s death.
This is apparently how we deal with criminals and the violently mentally ill in the West now—by ignoring them and hoping the problem will solve itself. In many ways, this is an over-correction for the asylums of the 20th century, where the disturbed and vulnerable were locked away and treated with little compassion or understanding. Today, the cultural memory of barbaric practices like force-feeding, electro-shock therapy, and lobotomies seems to prevent Western societies from taking any steps at all to detain and treat the mentally unwell.
This attitude is summed up by a statement from Vi Lyles, the mayor of Charlotte, in which she described Zarutska’s brutal murder as “a tragic situation that sheds light on problems with society safety nets related to mental healthcare” and urged people to “look at the entire situation.” Lyles also stressed that she was not “villainising those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused. Mental health disease is just that—a disease like any other that needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence, and commitment as cancer or heart disease.” The major difference is, of course, that cancer or heart disease don’t typically make a person attack or kill those around them. This soft-touch approach to mental health cannot fly when the patient is a potential danger to themselves and others.
Tellingly, Lyles’s statement spent more words encouraging us to have “compassion” for the perpetrator than calling for justice for the victim herself. Zarutska barely gets a mention at all from the mayor, other than to express some generic thoughts and prayers and to urge social-media users not to share CCTV footage of the moments leading up to the attack. Lyles’s reluctance to talk about Zarutska’s murder is no exception, either. By and large, progressive national media outlets have basically ignored the incident. Despite the widespread fury on social media, The New York Times, Washington Post, and even the nominally neutral BBC are yet to run a single story about it. At the time of writing, CNN has just published its first article about Zarutska an hour ago.
The reason for this silence on the Left should be fairly obvious. As Mary Harrington points out in UnHerd, “there is simply no obvious way to make [Zarutska’s] murder intelligible within American race politics in a way that does not serve Right-wing narratives.” No wonder progressives would rather pretend this never happened—it goes against their fundamental belief that certain sections of the population are perpetual victims and therefore can never do any wrong. By the logic of identity politics, Brown should be near the very top of the victim hierarchy. He is black, homeless and mentally ill. There is no room in the identitarian worldview for him to be anything other than a victim—of white supremacy, of capitalism, of police brutality, of systemic racism in the justice system, or whatever else it might be. The idea that someone like him might savagely attack and kill another person without provocation is beyond comprehension. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
As much as the Left would like to believe otherwise, ignoring crime does not make it go away. Letting severely mentally ill people with multiple criminal convictions roam the streets is not the kind or caring option for anyone. It is especially reckless to make excuses or set low expectations for violent criminals because they come from ‘victim’ groups—whatever that means. Far too often, lives could have been saved if only the authorities had fulfilled their duty to uphold public safety. Real compassion starts with protecting the innocent.
The Many Horrors of Iryna Zarutska’s Murder
A still of the CCTV footage showing the moment before the fatal attack
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The murder of Iryna Zarutska is layers upon layers of awful tragedy. The 23-year-old woman fled her home country of Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in 2022, seeking refuge in North Carolina. Instead of finding safety, she was brutally murdered while riding the train in Charlotte, N.C.
One particularly shocking element is that the whole incident was caught on CCTV. On August 22nd, Zarutska can be seen getting on the train at around 10pm, having just finished her shift at Zepeddie’s Pizzeria. She takes a seat in front of the murder suspect, 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr., and scrolls through her phone. Just four minutes later, the suspect takes what looks to be a pen knife from his hoodie pocket, and stabs Zarutska three times, at least once in the neck. The attack appeared to be entirely random. Victim and suspect did not know each other. They had shared no interaction on the train prior to this. Zarutska was simply minding her own business, trying to get home from work at the end of the day. For this scene to go so quickly from ordinary commute to senseless murder is the stuff of nightmares.
Then there was the fact that Brown was known to the authorities—that dreaded phrase we see come up time and again in cases like these. Brown, who is currently homeless, has spent most of his life in and out of prison, having appeared in court no fewer than 14 times. He previously served a five-year sentence for armed robbery, and was arrested again for assaulting his sister, just months after being released in 2020. He also has a history of mental-health issues and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Earlier this year, he was charged with abusing the 911 emergency number, when he called to complain that he had “man-made” material inside his body, which he believed was controlling his movements.
Why was this man, who had consistently proved to be a danger to himself and others, allowed to walk the streets freely? I am reminded of a similar case here in the UK, also involving a dangerous, severely mentally ill man who the authorities failed to properly treat and restrain. In 2023, Valdo Calocane randomly began attacking passersby in central Nottingham, killing three people—two 19-year-old students, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber, and 65-year-old school caretaker Ian Coates. Like Brown, Calocane was known to the authorities and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was supposed to be in the care of the NHS, but kept refusing treatment, because he was afraid of needles. Nobody involved seemed all that concerned with ensuring that Calocane actually received the antipsychotic medication he needed. The cost of this carelessness and apathy was three people’s lives.
In another, eerily similar case from Germany last month, 16-year-old Liana K.—also a refugee from Ukraine—was killed when she was randomly pushed in front of a moving train. The suspect is believed to be a failed Iraqi asylum seeker, who was supposed to have been deported years ago. Once again, the suspect was also suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Like Zarutska, Liana and her family had fled to Germany, believing they would be safe there. Instead, the authorities’ failure to enforce the law resulted in a 16-year-old’s death.
This is apparently how we deal with criminals and the violently mentally ill in the West now—by ignoring them and hoping the problem will solve itself. In many ways, this is an over-correction for the asylums of the 20th century, where the disturbed and vulnerable were locked away and treated with little compassion or understanding. Today, the cultural memory of barbaric practices like force-feeding, electro-shock therapy, and lobotomies seems to prevent Western societies from taking any steps at all to detain and treat the mentally unwell.
This attitude is summed up by a statement from Vi Lyles, the mayor of Charlotte, in which she described Zarutska’s brutal murder as “a tragic situation that sheds light on problems with society safety nets related to mental healthcare” and urged people to “look at the entire situation.” Lyles also stressed that she was not “villainising those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused. Mental health disease is just that—a disease like any other that needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence, and commitment as cancer or heart disease.” The major difference is, of course, that cancer or heart disease don’t typically make a person attack or kill those around them. This soft-touch approach to mental health cannot fly when the patient is a potential danger to themselves and others.
Tellingly, Lyles’s statement spent more words encouraging us to have “compassion” for the perpetrator than calling for justice for the victim herself. Zarutska barely gets a mention at all from the mayor, other than to express some generic thoughts and prayers and to urge social-media users not to share CCTV footage of the moments leading up to the attack. Lyles’s reluctance to talk about Zarutska’s murder is no exception, either. By and large, progressive national media outlets have basically ignored the incident. Despite the widespread fury on social media, The New York Times, Washington Post, and even the nominally neutral BBC are yet to run a single story about it. At the time of writing, CNN has just published its first article about Zarutska an hour ago.
The reason for this silence on the Left should be fairly obvious. As Mary Harrington points out in UnHerd, “there is simply no obvious way to make [Zarutska’s] murder intelligible within American race politics in a way that does not serve Right-wing narratives.” No wonder progressives would rather pretend this never happened—it goes against their fundamental belief that certain sections of the population are perpetual victims and therefore can never do any wrong. By the logic of identity politics, Brown should be near the very top of the victim hierarchy. He is black, homeless and mentally ill. There is no room in the identitarian worldview for him to be anything other than a victim—of white supremacy, of capitalism, of police brutality, of systemic racism in the justice system, or whatever else it might be. The idea that someone like him might savagely attack and kill another person without provocation is beyond comprehension. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
As much as the Left would like to believe otherwise, ignoring crime does not make it go away. Letting severely mentally ill people with multiple criminal convictions roam the streets is not the kind or caring option for anyone. It is especially reckless to make excuses or set low expectations for violent criminals because they come from ‘victim’ groups—whatever that means. Far too often, lives could have been saved if only the authorities had fulfilled their duty to uphold public safety. Real compassion starts with protecting the innocent.
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