On August 22d, an ethereally lovely, 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee named Iryna Zarutska finished up her shift at the pizzeria in Charlotte where she worked. Still in her black t-shirt and khaki pants uniform, blonde hair up under the business’s ballcap, Zarutska got on the Charlotte Area Transit System’s (CATS) light rail train for the trip home.
As most everyone would do, she parked in an aisle seat and immediately began to check her phone. After a work shift, she seems to have been pretty engrossed in it, as you’d imagine, especially at her age. Plus, there’s always the comfort of having something to read in a sparsely filled car populated with strangers.
Get your seat, mind your own business, and get off at your stop.
Iryna Zarutska never left that car.
Unbeknownst to her, when she found a seat and pulled out her phone, besides being a turnstile jumper, the man slouched across the two seats directly behind her, whom someone described as ‘looking emotional,’ was a monster. A deranged beast who would suddenly do something so unspeakably savage to the slender wisp of a girl in the seat before him that it beggars description.
The girl who left the wartorn devastation of her home country in search of something better and safer, and started over in the Queen City.
This still shot horror isn’t a Netflix creation.
You are either on the side of the young woman or the animal who slaughtered her
Time for choosing pic.twitter.com/haoamy1fFo— Jim Hanson (@JimHansonDC) September 6, 2025
This is beyond evil and so ghastly, it’s unfathomable.
…The video above shows different angles on the rail car before and after the deadly attack. WBTV edited together pieces of surveillance footage, excluding video of the actual stabbing.
The first clip shows the stabbing suspect, identified as Brown, sitting on the rail car before Zarutska boards the light rail. Brown can be seen moving around in his seat and appears to be emotional.
The next clip shows one angle of Zarutska entering the rail car and sitting down in front of Brown. The clip that follows is another angle showing Zarutska entering the rail car and sitting down.
About one minute and 30 seconds into the video, Brown can be seen taking out a pocket knife, unfolding it, standing up, and gearing up to attack Zarutska. WBTV froze that clip moments before Zarutska is stabbed.
In the full video, WBTV observed the attacker swing his arm and stab Zarutska three times in the throat area before walking away. Zarutska looked visibly shocked by the attack, falling to the floor shortly after.
Iryna Zarutska died there. The barbarous, murderous creature folded his knife and walked away.
At least one of the passengers ran to her side as the savage left.
This had been a real life, just beginning a new, hopeful chapter.
It was stolen from her by the progressives wallowing in toxic empathy who enabled a career criminal named Decarlos Brown Jr.. A repeat offender whom the city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County allowed to wander the streets even after 14 felony arrests and a five-year prison stint.
Prosecutors kept turning this guy loose.
…Brown has 14 previous court cases in Mecklenburg County. He was sentenced to six years in North Carolina prison after convictions for robbery with a dangerous weapon, breaking and entering, and larceny in Mecklenburg County in 2015. The convictions were for two separate incidents in 2013 and 2014, according to jail records.
Zarutska’s was a real life that wasn’t important enough, no matter how horrific her passing, because it would hurt the narrative, the carefully constructed narrative.
If you weren’t from the local area, did any of you hear about it?
I never had until yesterday, and that is only because the security video from that fateful few minutes on the CATS light rail car came bursting into public consciousness. Shamefully, only after members of the Charlotte City Council intervened personally in an attempt to block release of the ghastly footage and were foiled.
And, dear GOD – the horror reportedly on that video. Just reading about it made me nauseous (Video available here at WBTV).
That precious, innocent girl and that monster.
That monster whom the progressive, BLM-loving, DEI-mad woke rulers of the Queen City had embraced and are embracing still.
The mayor of Charlotte, another incompetent female of the progressive genus who has had her hooks in the city since 2017 (and shame on voters), is making sure to excuse the killing. Insisting even as horrified viewers watch a slaughtered refugee’s blood drip on their own light rail car, that the city ‘can’t arrest our way out of this.’ These poor, confused souls.
TOXIC EMPATHY
How would she know? You’d have to actually try to prosecute whoever you arrest before you claim such a thing.
The mayor of Charlotte blames the savage stabbing of an innocent woman on “mental health disease” which she says should be treated with “compassion” in the same way that we treat cancer. Mental health has become an excuse for all human evil. That was always the intention. The… pic.twitter.com/XWjvZUpwhQ
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 6, 2025
Vi Lyles never mentioned Iryna’s name as she made excuses for the murder until the video was released.
For the record, if someone ever violently murders me in an innocuous public setting, I want my family and my friends to raise hell about it. I would not have wanted you to be compassionate. I would want you to avenge me.
Thanks. https://t.co/H1qNJwT7Gi
— L (@SomeBitchIIKnow) September 7, 2025
TOXIC EMPATHY
And now this darn light rail car security camera release is making them all look bad.
Today, she is weeping crocodile tears for the victim, asking people not to share the horrific video images – respect for the victim’s family, you know, not because it’s damning for the city – and Mayor Lyles is suddenly ‘THINKING HARD ABOUT SAFETY.‘
You sound more angry towards people sharing the footage than you are towards the violent thug who stabbed Iryna.
Bizarre.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 6, 2025
…This was a senseless and tragic loss. My prayers remain with her loved ones as they continue to grieve through an unimaginable time.
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.
It’s bizarre that she and the Charlotte city government have apparently never done so before this.
This attack is nothing new for the Charlotte rail system, and Decarlos Brown Jr is not an aberration. Not a one-off by any stretch of the imagination.
Regular occurrence for women on Charlotte public transit, apparently. pic.twitter.com/hJRzZ8cDm9
— L (@SomeBitchIIKnow) September 7, 2025
And yet?
The city only hired a safety and security officer for the CATS system at the beginning of this month, after this vicious murder, and while under pressure to release the video.
PATHETIC
…CATS officials said during a public transit meeting on Sept. 2 they have hired a chief safety and security officer, tripled the safety budget and started replacing aging cameras with high-tech upgrades since the killing. Security officers have also been more visible on trains since the attack.
On Sept. 22, CATS will ask the city council for a partnership with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department to have more police on buses and trains. CATS officials also said Friday that they released the video due to media requests.
For all the talk of ‘thinking hard about what safety looks like,’ according to folks who have to ride the light rail, that’s all the mayor’s doing.
They’re not seeing anything that makes them believe there’s extra security.
…We rode the light rail on Friday from about 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., starting at the East-West station in South End near where the stabbing happened.
We went round-trip for about 20 stops total. We did not see a single security officer.
“I do think they need to step up some more measures, I don’t know what that looks like,” said the rider who did not want to be identified.
…The agency told city leaders this week that they are also focused on fare enforcement. They do not believe Brown had a ticket.
Rider Marwa Daud believes it makes a difference when riders know that security is checking to see if people paid because it gets people off the light rail who mean to cause problems and keeps others who need it on.
“I feel like they’re not there just to create chaos, they’re there to go from point A to point B,” said Daud.
Welp. Thinking is what progressives do best.
It’s doing things they have problems with.
“The American Dream” pic.twitter.com/YVXeOB7YZw
— Graham Banks Cull (@1GrahamDaily) September 6, 2025
For Miss Zarutska, who only wanted that better life?
This was the 23-y-old Ukrainian war refugee Iryna Zarutska.
She was stabbed to death on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina by the repeat offender Decarlos Brown Jr.
We don’t have to live like this 🇺🇸🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/K5wJsCYpCA
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 6, 2025
May her memory always be a blessing to those who loved her.
Toxic empathy and progressive government are a killer combination, as I am entirely convinced they are designed to be.
There are no sympathy marches for the victims, no weepy righteous statements of empathy from elected progressive officials for the movement’s sacrificial lambs, be they a 6-year-old black child or an 84-year-old grandmother shot and killed as one of any fifty-plus shootings in an average Chicago weekend of black-on-black carnage. No high-profile visits to the families of another grandfather or teenager who was shoved from a platform to their death in front of an oncoming commuter train in New York City by yet another one of the city’s homocidal, lunatic homeless felons.
Because you can’t arrest your way out of that.
No mention of the name of a refugee who worked at a pizzeria and was simply trying to get home when another progressive privileged victim-class multiple felon plunged a knife at least three times into her neck as she sat quietly, checking her phone after work.
At least, there was no mention until the heinous, most foul nature of the slaughter and the official stonewalling became too much to conceal.
Then the crocodile tears flowed, but only as long as they could be used to defend the indefensible. ‘Respect for the family’ became the rallying cry for those desperate to conceal the baseness and brutality of the ugly truth.
And ‘compassion’ – progressives are always with big compassion for the guy with the knife.
You want an explanation for this horrific murder and the skyrocketing rates of violent crime in Charlotte? It’s because this has been the priority of our Public Safety Department for the last few years.
And now our mayor @ViLyles tells us that this brutal killer is like… pic.twitter.com/MINEHrJXDL
— Megan Basham (@megbasham) September 6, 2025
…And now our mayor @ViLyles tells us that this brutal killer is like someone suffering from “cancer” and needs our “compassion.”
Toxic empathy and progressive government are a killer combination.
And it IS progressives – don’t ever let them gaslight you into thinking differently.
The dumber ones say it out loud.
It’s never anyone close to them on their progressive sacrificial altar, so they don’t care.
0 AP stories on this deadly attack
0 PBS stories on this deadly attack
0 NYT stories on this deadly attack
0 NPR stories on this deadly attack
0 WSJ stories on this deadly attack
0 BBC stories on this deadly attack
0 CNN stories on this deadly attack
0 WAPO stories on this… pic.twitter.com/962qmFOBNm— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 7, 2025
People in these cities need to wake up to the fact that they are nothing but rodents used for feeding predators in the grand progressive social experiment.
This is wild pic.twitter.com/D0MtyAbNNX
— LASHY BILLS (@LASHYBILLS) September 7, 2025
Nobody HAS to live like this.
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