The savage murder of Iryna Zarutska in North Carolina last month has laid bare the daily terror of American urban life, the hypocrisy of the American mainstream media, and the negligence of the American political elite.
On Monday, President Donald Trump briefly addressed the murder during a speech on religious liberty. “When you have horrible killings, you have to take horrible actions,” Trump said. “There are evil people. We have to be able to handle that. If we don’t handle that, we don’t have a country.”
I agree with the sentiment. My basic philosophy of law and order is this: Someone’s head is getting bashed. The only question is which heads will be bashed and who will be doing the bashing. Personally, I think we’ll all fare better if the heads belong to bad guys and the bashers have police badges.
But the president should do more to highlight the Zarutska murder, discussing it in blunt terms to seize the political advantage, kick off an honest conversation about violent crime in America, and restore public safety. A Truth Social post he published later on Monday was a great start, and the Trump administration needs to keep up the pressure on the Democrats and liberal media.
A Ukrainian refugee who fled her war-torn homeland in 2022, the 23-year-old Zarutska was stabbed to death last month by Decarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old black man, on a light-rail car in Charlotte. Zarutska entered the car a little before 10 p.m. after finishing a shift at the pizzeria where she worked. She sat in front of Brown, looked at her phone, and made herself most unobtrusive, tiny arms and ankles crossed.
That proved too much for Brown to handle. A career criminal whose numerous past convictions include armed robbery, felony larceny, assault, and breaking and entering, Brown rubbed his forehead and shifted in his seat before stabbing the young woman repeatedly with a pocketknife from behind. In a clip that went viral on X Monday evening, Brown stumbles through the car, blood dripping from his blade, and appears to mutter “I got that white girl.”
The grisly murder had remained an obscure local story until surveillance footage hit social media this weekend, sparking outrage and forcing Charlotte’s Mayor Vi Lyles to respond.
In a statement released Saturday morning, Lyles lamented the “heartbreaking attack that took Iryna Zarutska’s life” and thanked “media partners” for not reposting the footage. “I’ve been thinking hard about what safety really looks like in our city,” Lyles said.
No evidence has emerged that Lyles is capable of thinking clearly about safety in the city she nominally governs. In late August, days after the Zarutska attack, Lyles said the episode highlighted the importance of creating support services for people like Brown, the murderer. “We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” she said. “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.”
Brown seems to suffer from a strange affliction that predisposes him to inflict astonishing violence on the small and the weak. This was the same malady suffered by Jordan Neely, the “Michael Jackson impersonator” who in May 2023 harassed and threatened passengers on a New York City subway until a courageous rider, Daniel Penny, subdued and accidentally killed him. Depicted in the mainstream media as a kind-hearted “dancer,” Neely in fact had a history of accosting children, women, and the elderly before encountering Penny, a former Marine.
Penny was ultimately exonerated of negligent homicide after being released on $100,000 cash bail, facing up to 15 years in prison, and having his name sullied. Since Penny is white and Neely was black, the act of civic heroism was treated like a modern-day lynching. Brown, by contrast, was released without bond by a magistrate judge this January after he made a “written promise” to return for a court hearing.
To be fair, Brown had been arrested for a crime that, by his standards, was rather minor: misusing the 911 emergency system. During a welfare check, Brown told police officers that a “man-made” substance had been implanted in his body to control its basic biological functions. After the officers explained they didn’t handle that sort of thing, he became frustrated and called 911.
But a sane criminal justice system would have seized the opportunity to keep Brown off the streets, considering the great lengths to which he had gone over many years to demonstrate the extreme danger he posed to others. Alas, the judge, Teresa Stokes, instead showed Brown the kind of “compassion” that Lyles has since called for, and she let him go.
Perhaps Stokes developed her deep reserves of empathy for human predators at the Second Chance Services “treatment facility,” where she serves as operations director. Brown, given yet another “second chance,” used it to steal an innocent person’s only life.
The silver lining in this dreary affair is that concerned Americans are demanding better from their nation’s elites.
Over the weekend, several MAGA influencers not only lambasted the Charlotte city government, but also contrasted the mainstream media’s breathless coverage of the accidental killing of Neely with its despicable silence on the brutal stabbing death of Zarutska.
Under rising pressure, mainstream outlets on Monday finally acknowledged the latter case—with apparent reluctance and even agitation. “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message,” blared an Axios headline. The reporter, Marc Caputo, wrote:
Influential conservative social media accounts accused major national news outlets of not covering the racial dynamics of the Charlotte killing — a white victim and a Black suspect — with the same intensity as they did in the case of Daniel Penny.
The whole report—down to the inconsistent capitalization of “black” and “white”—almost seems designed to vindicate those pesky conservatives it covers.
You might think the case would command sympathetic headlines, given the shocking nature of the murder and the human interest of a young, beautiful Ukrainian war refugee being brutally murdered in an unprovoked attack while simply going about her socially productive activities.
Yet Caputo all but apologized for even writing the story, and seemed, like Charlotte’s mayor, to resent the availability of surveillance footage. “The rising number of surveillance cameras in public spaces, including on Charlotte’s light rail, has become a big accelerant in these cases,” he wrote. “The video is easily shared or leaked, and can instantly pollinate across social media — a visual counterpoint to statistics showing crime decreases.”
Clearly, conservatives are right to condemn racial bias among political and media elites.
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Incredibly, prominent Republican politicians lately have been more inclined than their Democratic counterparts to engage in explicit anti-white rhetoric. “All of these protesters are white,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas sneered on X after a demonstration in DC against a federal crackdown on crime.
Trump and his team should take a different approach and treat the Zarutska murder as an opportunity to do so. The case illustrates several themes the president has emphasized—urban violence, woke politics, fake news, and the worsening plight of working-class whites—and it has galvanized his most influential online supporters while backing the media into a corner.
Most importantly, it vividly demonstrates the delusional character of modern liberalism on matters of race and criminal justice, which Caputo might have understood had he more closely inspected those crime statistics he cited. The delusion must be ruthlessly exposed if we are to solve the problems that led to the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a woman who escaped high-intensity war in Ukraine but could not survive public transportation in America.
