Late last month, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee was stabbed to death on a Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail train in a brutal murder that has largely gone unreported until now.
The Murder
Surveillance footage released by the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) shows Iryna Zarutska boarding the Lynx Blue line just after 9:45 pm on August 22 wearing her uniform from a local pizzeria. She sat down in front of a man in a red hoodie and could be seen scrolling on her phone with headphones in her ears in the moments before the seemingly random attack. At no point in the footage do the two interact.
According to court documents, the train traveled for approximately four and half minutes before the man in the hoodie pulled a knife from his pocket, unfolded the knife, stood up, and stabbed the victim three times. The suspect then walked through the rail car as blood dripped off him and took off his sweatshirt before exiting the train at the next station.
Police were called and witnesses reported that a man had stabbed a woman in the throat inside a train car. Law enforcement apprehended 34-year-old Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr. on the outbound platform. He has since been charged with first-degree murder, which is but the latest addition to his lengthy rap sheet.
Brown has 14 previous court cases in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, and was sent to prison in 2015 for robbery with a dangerous weapon. He was released a year early in 2020 and was arrested again this past January for misuse of the 911 system. In July, a judge reportedly ordered a mental health evaluation. It is unclear whether one was completed.
Zarutska was unresponsive when emergency personnel arrived at the scene. Born in Kyiv, she came to the United States in 2022 with her family to escape the war in Ukraine. Her obituary said she “quickly embraced her new life in the United States,” and she was remembered as a beloved employee of Zepeddie’s Pizzeria. She had dreams of becoming a veterinary assistant.
Radio Silence
Local media outlets that received the surveillance video from the transit authority have chosen not to release the moment of the attack or what happened immediately after it, which Megyn took issue with on Monday’s show. “It is not their job to protect us from the facts… For all of the news outlets to not release it at all is strange to me,” she said. “It is an incident that happened and the specifics of it may matter. We actually had a hard time getting our hands on the full video.”
At the national level, there was nary a mention of the senseless murder for more than two weeks. “There are so many angles to this story,” Megyn noted. “It is an absolute disgrace that the national media remains silent about this… As of Sunday, there was zero coverage on the AP, PBS, New York Times, NPR, CNN, Washington Post, MSNBC. Zero.”
With public interest mounting, the outlets that have gotten around to covering the case have mostly decided to politicize the violence. For example, “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message” was the headline on Axios Monday morning. “They are upset about the numerous surveillance cameras in America now that happened to catch these incidents so that the MAGA Republicans can turn them into an issue – that is what they see this story about,” Megyn posited.
“There is just no question in my mind the story, for the media, is about many uncomfortable narratives that they would rather not touch. Chief among them: A black man hacked to death a young, beautiful, white, blonde woman right on camera,” she added. “They don’t want to touch it because that plays into a narrative with which they are very uncomfortable.”
Playing Politics
Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles has seemed similarly uncomfortable with the facts of the case, calling the murder an “unfortunate and tragic outcome.” She did not even mention the victim by name when she issued a statement about the violent crime.
“We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” Lyles said, in part. “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.”
National Review’s Rich Lowry called Lyles a “disgrace,” while Charles C.W. Cooke argued she does not understand the basic facts of the case. “We don’t need to get even to the mental health question because this person had been arrested for breaking and entering, for robbery with a firearm, for possession of a firearm as a felon, for assault, for material threats,” he explained.
“The idea that we can’t arrest our way out of this is preposterous,” Cooke added. “That’s precisely what we literally should have done in this case… We should have arrested our way out of this murder. That person should not have been free.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Cooke and Lowry by tuning in to episode 1,143 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.