The video of Decarlos Brown, Jr., slaughtering 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light-rail train on the night of August 22nd is sickening in many ways, but one aspect of the horror was how mundanely it unfolded. All of us who have had to contend with greater chaos and danger on mass-transit systems since 2020 have created useful fictions for ourselves: that wouldn’t happen to me, because I know not to sit near the crazy guy. I know to sit around other people. I know how to defend myself—punch someone, bite someone, scream. The video demolishes that fiction. We’ve also had to contend with a related fiction: that our transit systems remain safe. It’s time we stopped accepting random murders on our transit systems as normal.
Zarutska, a refugee who arrived from Ukraine in 2022, gets on the train after her shift at a local pizza joint, just before 10 p.m. A slender woman, probably less than 100 pounds, she’s dressed in the khaki pants, black t-shirt, and black baseball cap of her employer, her blond hair tucked away in the hat. A few other people, at least four, are seated in her area of the train car; she knows, if she is calculating her public safety, that she is not alone. She finds a seat in the middle of the car, right in front of another passenger. She has no reason to avoid this young black man, Brown, 34, dressed in a hoodie, who, as she sits down, appears to be struggling to stay awake (he has been muttering and making jerky movements in the moments before she gets on the train). For more than four minutes after Zarutska takes her seat in front of Brown, he remains quiet. Even if she had looked behind her, or saw the man in her window’s reflection, she has no reason to fear him; he might appear fidgety, but lots of people fidget on the train. Zarutska scrolls through her phone, at one point nearly dropping it. She takes her glasses off at another point and tucks them into her shirt. Nothing out of the ordinary is going on here. Other passengers get on and off. The automated announcement tells people to “please stand clear” at a stop.
Then Brown stands up, grabs Zarutska by the neck, and repeatedly slits her throat. The entire action takes less than four seconds. Zarutska looks up at Brown in seeming confusion as he walks away from her. She cowers into a fetal position on the seat, looking down as the blood spatters out of her onto the floor. She falls onto the floor in front of the seat, and you think, mercifully, that she is unconscious. But she’s not: her slender hand reaches up as she tries to grab her phone, most likely to try to ask for help. She appears conscious or semi-conscious for nearly a full minute as she bleeds out. Moments later, several passengers gather around Zarutska on the floor to try to help her, and to use their own phones to call police.
Zarutska had no chance of fighting back, and that would have been true if she were a man as well. What you also learn from watching this video is that you cannot depend on supposed safety in numbers to help you in an attack. The attack may happen too quickly for anyone to stop it, and the people around you may themselves be too confused, scared, or unsure of what to do to act instantly, even if doing so can save you.
Brown faces state and federal charges. But the goal is to stop crimes from happening before we have to punish murderers.
Could Zarutska’s slaughter have been prevented? Brown should not have been on the train. He has spent most of his adult life under arrest or in prison, including for violent crimes. He also has a schizophrenia diagnosis, and has behaved so alarmingly, including assaulting his sister, that his own mother had him involuntarily committed, and then, when he was released, ejected from the family home. During a check on his health this past January, Brown called the police on the police. In that case, instead of acting on the obvious danger of a person with a propensity toward violence suffering from delusions, a Charlotte judge released him on his own recognizance. Brown belonged in a mental facility.
Charlotte’s initial reaction to this horror was to hope nobody would notice. Instead of pledging a full review of where her city, county, or state failed, Charlotte mayor Vi Lyles, a Democrat, released an anodyne statement on the “tragic situation” and referring vaguely to “systems that should be in place.” She thanked media outlets for not running the gruesome video—as if it, and not the killing, were the problem. It wasn’t until the footage had chilled viewers around the nation that Lyles called the “murder” a “tragic failure by the courts and magistrates,” and said that we need a “bipartisan solution to address repeat offenders who do not face consequences for their actions and those who cannot get treatment for their mental illness.”
Much of the national press, though, prefers to spin Zarutska’s killing as a Republican plot to own the Democrats on crime. Axios, whose mission is to make its Beltway and business readers “smarter, faster,” had the smarmiest version: “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’S crime message,” it headlined its story. Axios then tried to pair “feelings” with a “reality check”: “Democrats have accurately pointed out that violent crime rates have been decreasing since pre-pandemic highs,” it informed its readers.
“Smarter” people will want to know the full story. The latest figures, through the end of 2024, show that the surge in national transit crime that began in 2020—mostly stranger-on-stranger unprovoked violence—hasn’t abated. From 2008 through 2019, an average of five people lost their lives to murder annually on American heavy-rail systems. Since 2020, the annual average has consistently been 15; last year’s 19 heavy-rail killings were the highest in at least 19 years. Between 2008 and 2019, the number of heavy-rail assaults nationwide averaged 315 annually; between 2020 and 2024, it averaged 728 annually. Across all U.S. transit systems, including light rail and bus, the annual pre-2020 average number of killings was 14; since 2020, it has been 40. The average annual number of assaults was once 836; now it is 1,687.
These numbers obscure the fact that the rise in transit murders can’t be separated from a harder-to-measure increase in transit disorder. Many disturbed individuals board a train or bus screaming and yelling at other passengers but, thankfully, don’t murder anyone. They do make people feel less safe, though.
The real answer to the question of whether transit violence is “low” is to see the video of a mute Iryna Zarutska watching herself start to bleed out. It is obviously not low enough. If we can prevent this horror—and we know that we can because we used to—shouldn’t we? If, as much media coverage seems to suggest, only Republicans care about transit violence, then some Democrats who watch the video will become Republicans.
Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
