A Gruesome Murder Illustrates the Left’s Crime Failures
Repeatedly catching and releasing mentally ill career criminals isn’t genuine compassion, and it certainly doesn’t make anyone safer in American cities.
Iryna Zarutska fled Ukraine after Russia launched its invasion in 2022, only to die at the hands of a career criminal aboard a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina. What makes the 23-year-old woman’s murder particularly appalling among America’s several thousand annual murders is that it was so cold-blooded, caught on video, and emblematic of the Democrats’ horrific approach to crime.
The evening of August 22, Zarutska had just left her job at Zepeddie’s Pizza, a Charlotte restaurant, and boarded the train for home. She sat down in front of Decarlos Brown Jr. and began looking at her phone. A few minutes later, he pulled out and unfolded a pocket knife and rose to stab her several times in the neck. With no prior interaction, no warning, and no chance to defend herself, she soon died of her wounds.
Other passengers barely seemed to notice until he left the train with a trail of blood. They even got up and walked away from Iryna without helping her right away.
“Recently our Zepeddie’s family suffered a tremendous loss,” said her employer in a statement. “We lost not only an incredible employee, but a true friend. Our dear Iryna left this world far too soon, and our hearts are heavy with grief. Since her passing, we have kept a candle burning in her memory — a small reminder of the warmth, kindness, and light she brought into our lives every single day.”
The murder received scant, if any, public attention until Friday, when WBTV Charlotte released the video leading up to and following the gruesome murder.
Over the weekend, the only media outlets to cover the story were either local or conservative ones. The Leftmedia mostly ignored it, unless it was to write a story like the disgusting one at Axios: “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message.”
The irony is that Zarutska’s murder only happened because Democrat authorities in Charlotte also ignored Brown, a black, mentally ill homeless man, even as they released him from custody 14 times in recent years. He served five years for armed robbery, but was arrested and quickly released more than once after that. He should never have been on the streets or aboard any trains this August.
When faced with what she called a “senseless and tragic” murder, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles refused to even allude to the failures leading up to it, while chastising media outlets that made it public. “The video of the heartbreaking attack that took Iryna Zarutska’s life is now public. I want to thank our media partners and community members who have chosen not to repost or share the footage out of respect for Iryna’s family,” the mayor said in a statement. “Like so many of you, I’m heartbroken — and I’ve been thinking hard about what safety really looks like in our city. I remain committed to doing all we can to protect our residents and ensure Charlotte is a place where everyone feels safe.”
She’s just now “thinking hard” about safety? She’s “doing all we can”?
Hardly.
“We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” she also said. Actually, if authorities had kept Brown incarcerated after all those run-ins with the law, he wouldn’t have been able to board the train — without a ticket — and murder an innocent young woman.
She then declared that Brown’s violent mental illness is “a disease like any other that needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence and commitment as cancer or heart disease.” Cancer patients don’t typically murder others on trains.
In reality, authorities could have arrested their way out of this one — if they hadn’t kept releasing Brown. Authorities could have thought about safety before releasing him. Instead, they chose utterly false “empathy” and “compassion” for a man who belonged to a favored victim class. The mayor even called him “unhoused,” a leftist euphemism for vagrancy.
The city hired safety and security officers for the light rail after this murder. Before the murder? The city launched a “task force for racial equity in criminal justice.”
All of this reminds me of Daniel Penny, the Marine on the New York subway who subdued a violent vagrant only to be persecuted by the city for protecting himself and his fellow passengers. He lived and was acquitted of murder. Iryna Zarutska was not so fortunate. And in a just world, Decarlos Brown would very soon be six feet under.
If there’s what Axios would deride as a MAGA message here, it’s really simple: Democrats cause crime and side with criminals. Republicans fight crime and stand for law and order.
