On the evening of August 22, 2025, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, boarded the light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina, on her way home from work.
She had fled a war to find safety. She believed America would be a haven where a young woman could rebuild her life, learn English, and contribute honestly. Minutes later, she lay dying on the floor of that car, stabbed multiple times, bleeding out. The attack, lightning-fast and captured on surveillance video, shocked many, not merely because it was yet another terrible homicide, but because it forced Americans to confront the failure of institutions meant to protect them -- the innocent -- as well as the cultural paralysis that prevents ordinary people from intervening, and the ideological narratives that try to erase both motive and responsibility.
The suspect, identified by authorities as Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., was no stranger to police or courts. He had been arrested repeatedly over more than a decade — at least fourteen times — for crimes including robbery, burglary, assault, theft and more. He had a long-documented history of mental illness, including schizophrenia, and a recent paper trail of court-ordered psychiatric evaluations that somehow never materialized into protection for the public. In a prior case, a magistrate had released him on nothing more than a written promise to appear, despite a record that should have alarmed anyone.
Multiple reports relate that as he exited the train after the murder, he said, "I got that white girl." These words, if confirmed by law enforcement, speak to a motive. At a minimum, they reflect the lens through which many now see such events -- not only as homicidal acts by dangerously unstable people, but as anti-white racist attacks that our culture will bend over backwards not to name.
How could a repeat offender, who bears responsibility in a system that routinely values "equity" over innocent life, be free? Why do bystanders not intervene? Why is there such a stark divergence between "progressives" and "conservatives"?
Zarutska came from Ukraine, a country where air-raid sirens and funerals had become part of the daily soundtrack after Russia's invasion. Like many of her generation, she did what courageous people do: she moved forward. She found work in Charlotte, studied English, and apparently spoke about her future with the matter-of-fact resolve of someone determined to make good on the promise of a new country. She had training in art and restoration, which hints at the kind of person she was: someone who repaired what was broken.
She was also the face, like other girls and women needlessly murdered, often by people who should not have been here in the first place -- of America's better angels. The US is a nation that opens its doors to the persecuted. The brutality of Zarutska's murder violates that vision. It is one thing to read that a hardened gang member with a long rap sheet is killed in a dark alley by another thug. It is quite another to watch a young refugee, seated peacefully in a public space, attacked without warning by a man who should have been unable to reach her — because a responsible system would never have put him back among commuters in the first place.
Zarutska's murder -- and the murders of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin, Kayla Hamilton, and, most recently, Logan Federico, among others -- were preventable. They happened because a constellation of decisions — judicial, bureaucratic, cultural — favored the ideology of leniency and the comfort of excuses over the duty to protect the innocent.
"Bang! Dead. Gone. Why? Because Alexander Devante Dickey — who was arrested 39 Goddamn times, 25 felonies — was on the street," Stephen Federico, Logan Federico's father, testified before the US House Judiciary Committee.
The surveillance video from Zarutska's murder is devastating in its simplicity. There is no argument, no visible provocation, no mutual escalation. The killer rises, produces a small knife, and strikes with stunning speed. Zarutska collapses. The suspect departs. The entire sequence takes seconds. The camera does not editorialize, "contextualize" or "both-sides" anything. It simply shows.
The reaction across the country to these images did not resemble the visceral shock that follows civilizational crimes. The difference here is intimacy. This is not war abroad; it is peace at home. It is not a chaotic riot; it is an everyday commute. It is not a confrontation between adversaries; it is the unilateral butchery of a woman who did nothing but sit in the wrong place at the wrong time. A girl, lying murdered on the floor of a train, seemed almost "normal." The public has been anesthetized.
Why did no one intervene? We see people recoil, shift away, hover, stare. We see a few tentative steps, a delayed attempt at aid. We also see what is called the "bystander effect"— the tendency in a crisis to freeze, to wait for someone else to step forward, to try to absorb the unreality of the moment. The people who failed to act were not cowards. The event was not only unexpected and fast, but also a culture that discourages moral judgment and often punishes decisive action will, in moments like these, produce paralysis.
The second shock was the suspect's reported words as he exited: "I got that white girl." They are not on the official silent surveillance clip but appear in contemporaneous posts that accompany the video and in subsequent reports. Those words, if as witnesses and reports indicate, frame the murder not as random madness, but as an act laced with racial hate —but an inversion of the narrative that American elites have formalized for years. They also explain the frantic effort, in some quarters, to minimize, relativize, or "de-racialize" what happened. If race cuts both ways, the entire ideological scaffolding of selective outrage collapses.
The killer, Brown, is not an unknown quantity. His adult life reads like a case study in public-safety malpractice. The facts — long rap sheet, violent prior crimes, mental-health red flags — were in the open. In recent months, he had been arrested for misusing the 911 emergency system with delusional claims; in another case, he appeared before a magistrate who released him on a written promise to return to court. A judge later ordered a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he was competent to stand trial. The evaluation was delayed and the order ultimately canceled without being completed. What matters is that the evaluation did not happen. The judicial system released a man with a track record of instability and violence where he could wander among the public, riding trains, stewing in fantasies, and waiting for the next target of opportunity.
If one were to write a manual titled "How to Guarantee the Next Preventable Murder," it would read like this:
- Ignore the cumulative weight of a suspect's criminal history.
- Treat mental illness as a reason to avoid confinement rather than as a trigger for it.
- Embrace a philosophy that confuses "mercy" with evasion and "equity" with abdication.
- Send the accused to a psychiatric evaluation without ensuring completion.
- Let him back into society on a promise and a prayer.
Some will object that due process and civil liberties require patience, compassion, and, above all, avoidance of "pre-judging." The question, however, is not whether to abolish rights; the question is whether public safety is a legitimate state interest when the warning signs are as bright as the sun. A society that denies public safety out of ideological scruple is not civilized; it is decadent.
The Motive the Ruling Class Cannot Admit
The words attributed to the suspect as he left the train — "I got that white girl" — in one way confirm what many Americans seem to have sensed instantly: that race was part of the mental world in which this murder occurred. No one claims those words explain everything. We do not know, for example, how Brown's delusions, rage and personal history intertwined in the moments before the attack. But it is intellectually dishonest and morally shameful to pretend that explicit racial language is irrelevant. Precisely because many elites have spent years arguing that hate speech and "microaggressions" constitute violence, they now cannot turn around and say that explicit racial celebration of a murder means nothing.
Critics of attributing blame immediately tried to attack the evidence: no audio on the official surveillance clip; posts are "unverified"; witnesses could be mistaken; the phrase is a "right-wing myth." Yet, as subsequent commentary and reporting in conservative media make clear, multiple sources treated the quote as credible. Unless we are prepared to say that the only acceptable truth is the one that flatters politically correct narratives, we must take seriously that several members of the public seem to have heard the suspect say those words; and public anger is built, in part, on the conviction that America's institutions will do anything to avoid admitting anti-white hatred exists.
Confirmations will come or they will not. We should be cautious in what we claim as proven. But the possibility exists that there may be a double standard in which only certain victims count; only certain hatreds are named, and only certain lives deserve national mourning. The murder of Charlie Kirk a few weeks later appears to have been motivated by policies concerning transsexuality, not race.
The Bench: Who Put These Judges There?
Turning to the judiciary, the question arises: who nominates and appoints the local judicial officers who made the decisions that freed this man? In many states, the answer varies. But across many jurisdictions, judges are not elected but are political appointees. The result is a hybrid system in which legal culture—especially in large cities—leans toward the ideological fashions of the day.
For the last decade, those fashions have included:
- Cashless bail or "release on recognizance" as default, even for repeat offenders;
- A prosecutorial posture that treats jail as a last resort and crime as a symptom of inequality;
- A judicial demeanor that prizes therapeutic language over physical deterrence;
- An institutional allergy to public shaming of poor decisions — unless the accused is a white policeman or was appointed by "conservatives."
Within this climate, a judge who lets a known repeat offender walk free based on a promise, or who orders a psychiatric evaluation without requiring its completion, is simply doing what the legal culture has told him is "virtuous": lowering the cultural footprint that forbids "criminalizing mental illness." The result is a bench populated by people who confuse compassion with negligence. They may genuinely believe they are building a fairer, gentler system. In many respects, some children may not be the recipients of ideal parenting -- sometimes any parenting, apart from the street -- or of mental health care. These youngsters are ignored by the political class to a degree that is almost criminal itself – after all youngsters do not vote. There never seem to be sufficient funds seriously to address problems of mental health. What our leaders, sadly, appear to be building are conveyor belts from probation to homicide.
The judiciary does -- or does not -- answer to the public. If a judge repeatedly prioritizes ideology, no matter how well-intended or compassionate, it would be better for the physical and mental health of everyone else if that judge were held accountable. Legislatures might revise standards for pretrial detention involving violent "priors" and active mental health flags; prosecutors, under such conditions, might seek deterrence: incentivizing the offender -- in a serious way -- not to commit further criminal acts.
The Psychiatric Loop: When Mercy Becomes Evasion
The line between criminal responsibility and psychiatric incapacity is among criminal law's most difficult conundrums. No serious person argues for ignoring mental illness. Some defendants are not competent to stand trial; some offenders genuinely do not understand what they do. But to cite mental illness as a reason to avoid secure confinement — especially when a defendant is violent and unpredictable — is to harm the innocent.
In these cases, if the system could move faster — if orders to establish mental competence could be enforced, the defendants evaluated promptly, and held for their own safety and the safety of others pending the outcome — more innocent people might still be alive. Instead, bureaucracy and ideology combined to produce a lethal delay. In the case of Zarutska, after the murder, the suspect was finally remanded for a full evaluation—sixty days at a state psychiatric facility -- a process that should have been initiated far earlier.
Regardless of the eventual finding, the public are entitled to request that, when in doubt regarding to whom to afford compassion -- the suspect or the public -- in an ideal world it would be both, but in the real world, there is a case to be made for protecting the public. The threshold for secure evaluation of violent, delusional repeat offenders should be lower than the threshold for their release — not the other way around.
It is not cruel to confine a dangerous, mentally ill man to a secure hospital. It is cruel to return him to a city train with a knife in his pocket and a world of demons in his head.
The Bystanders: From Courage Culture to Liability Culture
Why did so few help? Why did so many not transform, in the first seconds after the attack, into a collective surge? The simplest answer is fear. The suspect had a weapon; the strike was fast; the shock was overwhelming. But there also seems to be a problem of cultural programming. We seem to have taught generations that intervention is impolite, if not suspect. Physical courage may invite liability. Quick action could be condemned as "escalation." Additionally, because our elites have spent years telling citizens that the worst sin is to be on the "wrong side of virtue," many now choose inaction over the risk of being judged.
It is not always so. A society that celebrates duty, honor and responsibility produces different reflexes. An older America, or a current Israel, might show men and women leaping to restrain the attacker or taking command with the kind of everyday heroism that does not count "likes" or litigate exposure. The citizens on that train seemed simply to be products of a moral climate that has replaced virtue with liability.
A culture that wants to recover courage must re-teach it. That means public campaigns on bystander intervention, widespread first-aid training, and legal reforms that protect good-faith actors from ruinous lawsuits. It also means celebrating, not stigmatizing, those who step into danger for strangers. In a moment like the murder of Zarutska, seconds matter. Courage is a trained instinct.
The Progressive Reaction: Euphemism as a Shield
Among progressive commentators, the dominant response was familiar: "do not politicize," "avoid racializing," "focus on mental health," "remember that surveillance video has no audio," "crime is down," "root causes." Much of this is not wrong -- in the abstract. One can acknowledge that the clip lacks audio while also acknowledging that multiple reports of the suspect's words exist. One can care about mental health while also insisting that dangerous people be confined. One can care about civil liberties while also admitting that leniency can kill.
Why do progressive elites react this way? Perhaps because this case is devastating to their narratives and the way they regard themselves as "virtuous." The victim is a young white refugee who loved America. The suspect is a black man with a long criminal record, released repeatedly by a system that preaches compassion for the accused and indifference to victims. The event flips the script on decades of selective outrage. The bystanders' passivity exposes the spiritual emptiness of a culture that scorns responsibility, displeasure or having to protect things worth protecting and the ability to evaluate what those are. So many reach for their arsenal of euphemisms, hoping to sedate the nation back to sleep.
Some activists went further, scolding citizens for their anger and warning of "backlash." Others spotlighted unrelated causes— "equity in mental health," "poverty reduction" — as if any of these would have stood between Zarutska and the knife. Perhaps most grotesque were those who implied that even mentioning the suspect's alleged words was an act of bigotry. In elite discourse, naming or even speaking of anti-white hatred is now the ultimate taboo. It violates the moral arithmetic of a worldview that assigns all blame in a single direction.
The Conservative Response: Law, Order and the Return of Moral Memory
On the "right," the reaction fused grief with fury — and an agenda. Conservatives emphasized four core demands:
- Accountability for the judicial decisions that put a dangerous man back on the street: transparency, review, and removal where appropriate.
- Statutory reform to ensure that repeat offenders with violent histories and active mental-health red flags were detained pending trial and routed swiftly into secure evaluation if competence were in doubt.
- Restoration of policing and transit security, including police officers on trains, rapid-response protocols, and intelligence surveillance
- Cultural renewal: an unapologetic call to revive civic courage, duty, and the presumption that the innocent must be protected even if it offends academic theories or media sensibilities.
The conservative argument is not complicated. In any society committed to the rule of law, the first duty of the state is to protect the innocent. All other duties are subordinate. Budgets, bureaucracies, and slogans mean nothing if a young woman cannot ride a train without being slaughtered by a man who should have been nowhere near people. If compassion for the accused is not balanced by protection for the public, it is complicity.
The Numbers and the Narrative: Why "Equity" Cannot Keep You Safe
Supporters of progressive criminal-justice reforms point to charts and data purporting to show that "crime is down," that "violent incidents are statistically rare," and that "bail reform does not increase recidivism." If felonies are suddenly reclassified as misdemeanors, of course, it will look as if "crime is down." Honest analysts on both sides, however, know how fragile such claims can be. Crime trends vary by city; definitions change; reporting lags. Even if one granted every statistical mercy to reformers, the moral reality would remain unchanged: statistics do not bury the dead. The many atrocities that have taken place in the United States and Europe during the past few years should be enough to re-evaluate the legal assumptions that permitted them.
Moreover, "aggregates" disguise risk. The question is not whether "on average" someone released on his own recognizance will offend; the question is whether this person—with this record, these mental illnesses, these prior arrests—should have been released. No algorithm that downplays individualized risk to serve some ideological goal on paper is worth the blood that is spilled or the families that are crushed. Any legal system that cannot distinguish between a petty trespasser and a violent schizophrenic is not fit to govern a free people.
The Media Double Standard: Who Counts as a Victim?
The coverage patterns around Zarutska's murder followed a now familiar arc. Initial silence from prestige outlets; denunciations of "politicization" when conservatives demanded answers; hedging about motive even as evidence of racial hatred spread; a pivot to mental-health talking points; and then, finally, a reluctant acknowledgment that the problem was not going away—especially once federal charges and high-level political reactions made it hard to ignore. Had the demographic roles been reversed, the public knows the arc would have been different: saturation coverage, solemn panel discussions, front-page editorials, and statewide protests coordinated within hours.
This double standard is not, regrettably, a figment of partisan imagination. It is a feature of a media ecosystem in which narrative precedes fact. The victims who count are those who confirm the story that powerful institutions already want to tell. Everyone else is an inconvenience. In the case of Zarutska, the media's hedging confirmed a suspicion deeply rooted in the American mind: that in the newsroom's moral calculus, and in a reverse-racism, some lives are still more equal than others.
The Law That Must Change: Four Reforms
If this case is to mean anything beyond mourning, it must produce law. Not symbolic resolutions. Not hashtags. Law.
- Pretrial Detention Standards for Violent Repeat Offenders:
Where a defendant has a demonstrable record of violent acts and active mental-health flags, the presumption should flip in favor of detention pending trial. Judges need to be empowered — and expected — to hold such defendants. Review boards, in fatalities, should audit release decisions and publicize their findings. - Enforceable, Rapid Psychiatric Evaluation Protocols:
If a court orders a competency evaluation for a defendant with a violent history, that order must be executed immediately in a secure setting, with strict deadlines and penalties for noncompliance. Evaluations cannot be open-ended; extensions require sworn justification; public-safety risk must govern more prominent placement. - Transit Safety and Rapid Response:
Major urban transit systems should combine camera coverage with human presence—trained officers at high-risk hours stationed on platforms and cars. A system for conductors to summon immediate assistance, hemorrhage-control kits, and citizen-training campaigns need to be required in schools. - Judicial Accountability and Transparency:
Release decisions in violent cases should be recorded, with written rationales and data-collection for independent review. Repeatedly negligent judges should face consequences with "teeth." Even though many judicial appointments are for life to avoid possible coercion or retaliation, public confidence in the bench cannot survive opacity.
These reforms are not revolutionary. They are restorative. They assume what America once took for granted: that the state's first duty is for the "common defense;" that rights are matched by responsibilities, and that the innocent come first.
Culture: Teaching Courage Again
Law without culture is a brittle shell. Even the best statutes cannot substitute for the moral formation of citizens. We must therefore ask, without embarrassment, how to teach courage. Schools can start by replacing abstract "anti-bullying modules" with practical ethics: scenarios that demand moral agency, drills for emergency response, first-aid training, and peer leadership. Faith communities, civic groups and employers can do the same. We have normalized inaction, and then wonder, when knives flash, why most people turn away.
Teaching courage also means praising it. In a healthy society, heroes are known to children by name. They are not only athletes and entertainers; they are ordinary men and women who risked themselves for strangers. Cities should honor such people publicly. The media could tell their stories. When courage is celebrated, it replicates itself.
Finally, we must recover the language of virtue. Terms such as "honor," "duty," "sacrifice," and "nobility" have been mocked by decades of irony -- and probably cowardice -- but those do not stop knives. A train car can become a sanctuary only when the people inside it believe they are responsible for one another.
Why This Murder Is also a "Turning Point"
People call certain moments "turning points" not because policy changes overnight, but because consciousness does. The murder of Zarutska and others has shifted American consciousness in at least five ways:
- It re-centers victims. For years, elite discourse has foregrounded the accused, the incarcerated, the "system-impacted." The murders of Zarutska and others bring the focus back where it belongs — on the innocent.
- It exposes the lethal costs of judicial leniency. When a man with fourteen prior arrests and active delusions can ride a train with a knife, "reform" has become a parody of justice.
- It forces a reckoning with anti-white hatred. The alleged words, "I got that white girl," strip away the fiction that racism runs only in one direction.
- It breaks the hypnotic spell of euphemism. The images are too stark for "root-cause" poetry. People want law, order, and courage.
- It realigns political will. Expect a surge of support for candidates who promise to detain violent repeat offenders, to hold judges accountable, to fund police, and to protect citizens without apology.
For "progressives," this might be devastating. Their entire edifice — built on selective empathy, linguistic policing and data games — cannot withstand a single video clip of a young refugee bleeding to death because to them, their theories take precedence. That may be why they try to deny reality, to bury the words, to change the subject. It does not work. The country has seen too much.
Memory and Meaning
There will be more funerals. There will be candles and flowers and friends speaking about smiles, kindnesses and dreams. Perhaps a scholarship will be founded. Perhaps a mural will go up, bright with hope. But the most meaningful memorial is not on a wall or plaque; it is in the laws we pass, the judges we appoint, the habits we teach, and the courage we recover.
If we allow the old patterns to reassert themselves — if we let this murder and the others like it become merely entries in a bureaucratic ledger — then we will have betrayed the victims twice: first by failing to protect them, then by refusing to learn from their murders. If we truly act, however, the last chapter of their stories can yet be one of rescue -- of countless other lives the next time a man with a knife or gun sets his sights on a stranger.
No single event "ends" a political movement. But some events can redefine the battlefield. The murders of Zarutska and the other women are such events. The core claims of many over the past decade — about safety, about compassion, about truth — were weighed against blood and found wanting. The public apparently saw the real meaning of "bail reform": a knife in a commuter's neck, stealing from shops with impunity, children sent to rob the public in the streets since their handlers know minors receive light sentences, and so on. The real meaning of "de-stigmatizing" mental illness" is a paper order without a hospital bed. The real meaning of "do not politicize" is a command to swallow a lie. The real meaning of "equity" is a politics that counts lives differently depending on who the victim is.
Most devastating of all, the public saw the real meaning of courage versus cowardice. The first belongs to the ordinary citizen who places himself between danger and innocence. The second belongs to the ideologue who places theory between truth and justice. Zarutska's murder has helped the country to remember what it had been taught to forget: that civilization is earned, every day, by people who make themselves responsible for one another.
If and when Brown said, "I got that white girl," he did more than admit hatred. He exposed the obscene double standard at the heart of elite discourse. For years, we were told that speech could be violence, that silence could be violence, that thoughts could be violence — unless one could "relativize" the crimes away. This lie should now be at an end.
The road back from here begins with naming reality, continues through law and accountability, and ends in a culture where a train car is safer not only because a security officer stands on the platform, but because citizens are determined to stand up for one another. If this country chooses that road, we will have kept faith with those who believe in us.
Until then, let us tell the truth without apology and, without delay, set our hands to the work that could have saved the victims and might, some day, save you. May this work be the memorial that Zarutska and the other victims deserve.
Pierre Rehov, who holds a law degree from Paris-Assas, is a French reporter, novelist and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of six novels, including "Beyond Red Lines", " The Third Testament" and "Red Eden", translated from French. His latest essay on the aftermath of the October 7 massacre " 7 octobre - La riposte " became a bestseller in France.As a filmmaker, he has produced and directed 17 documentaries, many photographed at high risk in Middle Eastern war zones, and focusing on terrorism, media bias, and the persecution of Christians. His latest documentary, "Pogrom(s)" highlights the context of ancient Jew hatred within Muslim civilization as the main force behind the October 7 massacre.
