Recently, we learned about the murder of a Ukrainian girl who fled war-torn Ukraine, seeking the promise of the American dream. She was escaping from the violence of Russia’s expansion. Five decades ago, my family fled Soviet controlled Ukraine, fleeing the horrors of Soviet Russia’s control of Ukraine. Russia’s colonialism of the past and its current expansionism are predicated on violence. While my family struggled initially, we earned our own American dream and embraced American entrepreneurial culture. The murdered Ukrainian girl did not get that chance through no fault of hers.
On the night of August 22, 2025, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, boarded Charlotte’s LYNX Blue Line train after a shift at a local pizzeria. Minutes later, she was fatally stabbed in an unprovoked attack. Prosecutors say the man accused, Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., had sat behind her, unfolded a pocketknife, and struck three times before walking away. He was arrested nearby and charged with first-degree murder in state court. Days later, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Brown with causing death on a mass transportation system, an offense eligible for the death penalty. The tragic incident hit the top of the news cycle, only recently overshadowed by the gruesome assassination of political pundit, Charlie Kirk.
Grotesque facts of Iryna’s death have been repeated: a young woman who fled war in Ukraine, killed on a train; a suspect with a long criminal record; a political firestorm about crime and punishment. Yet, if we stop at “a dirtbag did something horrible,” we learn nothing and change nothing. What failed Iryna was not only a deranged individual, but a system that too often abandons people with serious mental illness until they intersect with crime—and then fails again. Brown’s family told reporters he had schizophrenia. Whether or not a court ultimately accepts any mental-health defense, Brown’s story is familiar: symptoms escalating, short stays in institutions, ineffective or nonexistent treatment, and, finally, catastrophe.
International coverage has highlighted Iryna’s journey from Kyiv bomb shelters to a new life in North Carolina. For nascent democracies and allies who look to the U.S. as a role model, the story reads like a parable: a nation that promises freedom and safety cannot care for people in psychiatric crisis or ensure basic safety on its public systems.
We have a moral obligation to examine not just who murdered Iryna but how the system failed both the victim and, in earlier stages, the accused – and ultimately the American people.
Mental illness does not lead to violence. Drug abuse, poverty, and a matrix of social stressors are more likely to lead to violent behavior. The American Psychological Association and other researchers have consistently found that most people with mental illness are not violent. The mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. None of this absolves Decarlos Brown of accountability, but it should prevent us from making policy out of anger. America is not in the throes of an ever-worsening crime crisis. Even as this particular killing rightly horrified the country, violent crime nationally fell in 2024—murders by about 15%—and early- and mid-2025 data show continued declines in many cities. A horrific murder of a young woman should galvanize reform; it should not license a baseless panic.
For a half-century, the United States has steadily shuttered psychiatric beds without building adequate, humane community care. By 2022, there were roughly 18 inpatient psychiatric beds per 100,000 population. Experts deem these numbers to be inadequate. Even state hospital systems report chronic shortages, especially for criminal patients. The result is predictable. People wait in ERs and jails for beds, sometimes for months; families beg for help but are told a loved one is not “dangerous enough”—until they are.
The public has a right to demand accountability: for the accused, if convicted; for the city, whose transit security posture is being reworked; and for the failed healthcare and legal systems, which allowed a deranged man to pinball through our inept courts without treatment or incarceration.
Our thought leaders must address the fact that this particular murder was preventable if our courts worked. Precision rebuilds trust; sensation erodes it. Calling the accused a “monster” may briefly soothe us, but it doesn’t protect the next Iryna. More accountability lies with the legal system that obtusely releases people like Brown into our communities. The question isn’t whether an individual is culpable if convicted; it is whether our institutions are doing what they should to prevent foreseeable harm. On that measure, we fail.
North Carolina’s commitment standards require mental illness plus dangerousness to self or others. Those lines are the product of decades of constitutional litigation designed to prevent warehousing and abuse. We should not purge them in a panic. We can build better supports so families don’t hear “come back when he’s dangerous.” That means rapid-access clinics, low-barrier long-acting injectable programs, and peer support. It also means placing clear limits on jail as a mental-health holding pen, setting deadlines for transfer to treatment, and funding the beds and teams that make those deadlines real.
Iryna’s tragedy became a political Rorschach: proof for some that cities are lawless, for others that social services have collapsed. For our government, it is an example of how the political left’s goals to defund the police and release violent criminals inexorably lead to senseless violence and undermine the American dream.
We owe Iryna justice in court. We owe future commuters a system that treats psychiatric crisis as a health emergency, not an administrative inconvenience that only becomes legible when blood is spilled. And we owe the world—watching, judging—a demonstration that the American dream that brought Iryna’s and my families to this country – isn’t just virtue signaling. If we mean what we say about public safety and human dignity, we must fund what works, fix what’s broken, and stop confusing harsh rhetoric with hard governance.
Yuri Vanetik is an attorney and Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. He served as California Criminal Justice Commissioner under Governor Arnold Schwartzenneger. He also serves on the board of White Ribbon USA, a nonprofit that works to end gender-based violence and discrimination against women.
