The brutal murder of a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee on a North Carolina bus has become a flashpoint in national discussions about urban safety, with President Donald Trump weighing in on the tragedy.
“I give my love and hope to the family of the young woman who was stabbed in Charlotte by a madman, a lunatic,” Trump said in a speech at the Museum of the Bible on Monday. “Just viciously stabbed, she’s just sitting there.”
“There are evil people,” the president added. “We have to be able to handle that. If we don’t handle that, we don’t have a country.”
The victim, Iryna Zarutska, came to the United States in 2022. She was returning from her job at a local pizzeria when Decarlos Brown stabbed her repeatedly in the neck. The video of the attack is profoundly disturbing and has circulated widely online, amplifying concerns about Charlotte’s escalating violent crime.
According to recent data, the city experienced a 25% increase in homicides last year — the second-highest on record, surpassed only by the peak in 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter riots. Robberies in the city center have surged 54%, general violent offenses are up nearly 10%, and “shootings into occupied property” have risen 42%.
Many Charlotte residents have said they no longer feel safe using public transit.
“I think that there’s a lot of things we could talk about, of the failure of what’s happened in Charlotte from nobody checking tickets to no real law enforcement that was there on the train,” North Carolina Congressman Mark Harris told The Daily Wire.
“I spoke to a parent who said that they had wanted to take their five-year-old for his birthday just a few weeks ago on a train ride. It was on a Friday at 11 o’clock in the morning. They did that, but they had to get off the train because of a fight that nearly broke out, and it was because it was somebody on there that didn’t have a ticket…And this dad said, ‘I just got my family and got off for our own safety.’”
“When you have things like that happening in your city, you’re seeing a city that is not being governed well.”
Brown had a lengthy criminal history, including at least 14 prior arrests for offenses such as armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Despite serving five years for the robbery, most of his other cases resulted in time served, probation, or community service.
His most recent arrest in January was for misusing 911, yet Judge Teresa Stokes granted him pretrial release despite his violent record. In 2024 alone, Brown had three encounters with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s (CMPD) community policing team, each time receiving referrals to resources and fines rather than jail time.
Critics argue that progressive reforms to North Carolina’s criminal justice system, implemented since 2020, contributed to Brown remaining on the streets. Two weeks after George Floyd’s death, then-Democrat Attorney General Josh Stein — now the state’s governor — announced the creation of a “Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice.”
“The inequities that African Americans experience, whether it’s in the economy, healthcare, our schools or the criminal justice system, are pervasive, just as they are wrong,” Stein, whose campaign for attorney general was supported by George Soros, stated at the time.
“The task force for racial equity and criminal justice will consider and implement measures that can bring about meaningful change to the criminal justice system. We will review law enforcement recruitment, training and accountability, as well as court issues, including pretrial release and the use of fines and fees.”
The task force’s recommendations included expanding pretrial release, decriminalizing homelessness and “public behavior,” and mandating “implicit bias training” for judges and prosecutors. Opponents say these changes directly enabled Brown’s repeated releases, with a later report from the racial equity task force highlighting that the task force’s recommendations on expanding pretrial releases were being adopted in courts around the state.
Adding fuel to the debate, Charlotte’s Democrat Mayor Vi Lyles issued a statement immediately following the stabbing that omitted any mention of Zarutska while calling for “compassion” toward the perpetrator.
“We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” Lyles said. “I want to be clear that I am not villainizing 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.”
A GoFundMe campaign has been set up to support Zarutska’s family, who said she came to the United States “seeking safety from the war and hoping for a new beginning.”
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