The shocking and apparently random fatal stabbing of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 22 has inflamed already furious debates over race and crime in U.S. cities. This uproar comes at a particularly perilous moment, with the Trump administration widening its National Guard deployments across the nation and the Supreme Court lifting restrictions that would prevent ICE agents from profiling people based on their ethnicity or what language they speak.
A confluence of factors have turned Zarutska’s death into a flashpoint. The suspect, 34-year-old Decarlos Brown, is a Black man with an extensive criminal record and a diagnosed mental illness. The killing took place on public transit in a major urban center, and was recorded by a security camera. Zarutska was the kind of young white blonde woman the political right tend to present as the typical and ultimate victim of unprovoked street violence, not to mention a survivor of Russia‘s war on her homeland. What’s more, national media didn’t immediately cover the story, in part because the horrific surveillance footage was not released until Sept. 5, at which point it quickly went viral on social media. Now outraged viewers are attacking the press for supposedly attempting to bury the story and using the video to push extremist views and propaganda.
Amid all the noise and attempts to capitalize on Zarutska’s murder, here is what we actually know about the tragic case so far.
Iryna Zarutska found a new life in the U.S. with her family
Zarutska, born in 2002 in Kyiv, Ukraine, fled the war-torn country in 2022 with her mother, sister, and brother, according to her obituary, which notes that “she quickly embraced her new life in the United States” and “became fluent in English within a very short time.” She had previously earned a degree in art and restoration from Synergy College in Kyiv and was attending Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, with hopes of one day becoming a veterinary assistant, and worked at a local restaurant, Zepeddie’s Pizzeria.
Zarutska can be seen wearing a Zepeddie’s T-shirt and baseball hat in the footage from the Lynx Blue Line light rail train where she was killed, indicating that she was likely traveling home from work when her assailant struck, shortly before 10 p.m. on the night of Friday, Aug. 22. She was wearing AirPods and scrolling on her phone, and did not interact with her attacker after taking a seat in front of him. He killed her with a foldable pocket knife about four minutes later, stabbing her three times, including at least once in the neck.
Decarlos Brown is an unhoused man with a history of arrests and mental illness
Brown was arrested stepping off the train at the next stop after Zarutska was stabbed, as other transit riders tried to render aid to her. She was soon pronounced dead at the scene. After he received medical treatment for a laceration, he was charged with first-degree murder, and is now being held in custody on a “no bond” order. A public defender has been assigned to his case. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brown has a history of citations and arrests in North Carolina dating back to 2011, according to court records, from minor infractions like speeding to more serious crimes such as communicating threats, breaking and entering, assault, and felony larceny. He was convicted of a 2014 armed robbery charge and served more than five years in prison. Once he got out, according to WSOC TV reporter Joe Bruno, Brown lived with his mother, Michelle Dewitt, who grew disturbed by his erratic and aggressive behavior. Dewitt told Bruno she eventually managed to secure an involuntary commitment order for her son; Brown was held for two weeks of psychiatric monitoring and ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia. He returned to his mother’s home, but she eventually kicked him out because of how “aggressive” he had become, leaving him unhoused, Dewitt said, according to Bruno.
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In January, Bruno reported, police conducted a welfare check on Brown at a hospital. He told them he was afflicted with a “man-made material” that controlled when he “ate, walked and talked”; when officers told him they could not help with an apparent medical issue, he grew frustrated and called 911, prompting them to arrest him for misuse of the emergency system, per WSOC TV. According to court documents, Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes granted his release without bail with a written promise that he appear for his next court date. In July, he was again in court over this charge, where his public defender raised the issue of his mental capacity. Chief District Court Roy Wiggins ordered a forensic evaluation of whether Brown could understand the legal proceedings against him. Such an exam was apparently not completed, since a motion to terminate it was entered the first week of September, after Brown had been charged with Zarutska’s murder. Dewitt has said that the courts should not have released her son back into the community given his mental health diagnosis and criminal behavior.
Zarutska’s death does not reflect current crime trends
Right-wing commentators have argued that Zarustka’s murder shows the dangers of Democratic policies in cities they claim are overrun by crime, necessitating crackdowns by militarized police and shows of force from the National Guard. (Although North Carolina went for Trump in 2024, Charlotte, like many metropolises within red states, is solidly blue.) Trump has taken a similar line, and on Monday made his first remarks on the killing, saying, that “there are evil people that we have to confront” and “when you have horrible killings, you have to take horrible actions.” He also posted a photo of Zarutska alongside Brown’s mugshot on Truth Social, blaming liberals for her death. “The blood of this innocent woman can literally be seen dripping from the killer’s knife, and now her blood is on the hands of the Democrats who refuse to put bad people in jail, including Former Disgraced Governor and ‘Wannabe Senator’ Roy Cooper,” he wrote. “North Carolina, and every State, needs LAW AND ORDER, and only Republicans will deliver it!
(The president also played up Zarutska’s refugee status, even though his administration suspended the Biden-era Uniting for Ukraine program that offered Ukrainian refugees temporary protections, and now appears to be letting these expire, potentially forcing thousands of them to return for lack of work authorizations and legal status.)
While Charlotte officials and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) are certainly facing tough questions over how someone like Brown might have fallen through the cracks of the justice system, it is not the case that the area is, along with other Democrat-voting cities, facing some onslaught of violence due to what the White House condemned as “woke policies.” In July, the CMPD released statistics for the first half of 2025 that indicated a 25 percent reduction in violent crime in the region compared to the same period in 2024, including a 29 percent drop in homicides. Nationally, the data varies greatly from place to place, but when Trump claims that “homicides are skyrocketing,” that is plainly false, with all the latest data — including from the FBI — showing otherwise. (The CMPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Finally, the rate of crimes committed on public transit, including homicide, has declined sharply since the height of the pandemic, contrary to alarmist rhetoric from conservatives like Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary. Driving a car, researchers have found, poses a greater safety risk than public transit due to both accident fatalities and roadway crime such as vehicle theft and road rage incidents that involve firearms.
The media has not ignored the story
Like many of the MAGA extremists calling for militaristic solutions to a supposed crime epidemic, Trump suggested that the press was deliberately turning a blind eye to Zarutska as a victim of senseless violence. “Additionally, where is the outrage from the Mainstream Media on this horrible tragedy?” he asked in his Truth Social post, despite the fact that he himself had not addressed the case until more than two weeks after Zarutska had been killed. Right-wing influencers meanwhile filled X with posts comparing the scattering of articles about Zarutska to the considerable number of media stories about the murder of George Floyd by then police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020, and on the death of Jordan Neely in 2023 after Marine veteran Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold on the New York subway. Fox News did the same. Their shared implication seemed to be that reporters care more about violence perpetrated against Black men by white men than violence against white women.
The apparent discrepancy in coverage has fairly obvious explanations. Zarutska’s murder was of course covered by local and state news affiliates in the immediate aftermath, but the video of it was not released to the public until Friday, at which point both national outlets and social media users began reacting to the chilling details of the deadly assault. The Floyd and Neely stories were extensively covered by outlets over many months because of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted over the former and the widely followed trials of Chauvin (convicted on two murder charges and one of manslaughter) and Penny (acquitted of criminally negligent homicide) that unfolded in the months following those deaths. The volume of articles on these cases simply reflects their development over an extended period time, whereas the state has yet to even assess Brown for his competence to stand trial per a judge’s order. Critics can rest assured that the media will pay attention to how the case is handled from here.
Racist propaganda has flourished in the online debate over this violent crime
Some on the far right disseminated the footage and still images from it in order to further a clearly racist agenda. Elon Musk, known for demonizing people of color and warning that whites are a “rapidly diminishing minority of global population,” shared one post from an X user calling Zarutska’s attacker a “thuggish black perp […] let off by judges who don’t believe in prison or black crime,” while failing to mention that Brown had spent years behind bars. This person added that Zarutska had been killed as a result of not knowing “the secret unspoken rules about who not to sit by” on public transit. Some shared pictures of other white victims of violent crime alongside pictures of the Black people charged in those incidents, looking to fuel an age-old narrative around “Black on white” crime.
But conservatives repeatedly distort the real statistics on race and victimization in order to stoke fear and hatred; the FBI has found year after year that homicide is largely intraracial, with the vast majority of white murderers targeting other whites, and the same holding true for Black perpetrators mostly victimizing their own race. Misinformation that presents whites as disproportionately harmed by Black people can have a radicalizing effect, as with Dylan Roof, who killed nine Black worshipers in a church basement in Charleston, South Carolina, in a 2015 mass shooting. He wrote in his racist manifesto that he had “never been the same” since Googling “Black on white crime” and finding the website for a white supremacist organization.
Reducing Zarutska’s cruel and untimely death to racist memes also erases the role that mental health — something that Republicans are happy to bring up whenever a white mass shooter guns down Americans in cold blood — likely played in the ghastly crime. It’s very convenient, however, for extremists hoping that Trump continues to weaponize federal resources against the minorities they despise, since this spin validates their authoritarian impulses and the politics of resentment that propelled their leader to power in the first place. As more details trickle out, you can expect them to milk this heinous crime for all it’s worth.
From Rolling Stone US
