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On Aug. 22 a young woman named Iryna Zarutska — a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who came to America to build a safer life — was murdered in cold blood on a Charlotte light rail train while other passengers fled in horror. Surveillance video shows the man seated behind her quietly pull a pocketknife, stand and stab her in the neck, leaving a community and a grieving family asking the obvious question: how was this allowed to happen? The brutality of the attack has rightly shocked the nation and demanded answers from those whose job is to keep citizens safe.
The man charged in the case, Decarlos Brown Jr., is not some random first-time offender — he has a documented criminal history going back more than a decade, including convictions for armed robbery that led to a five-year sentence, plus at least a dozen other arrests. Yet magistrates and prosecutors let him back on the streets this year after a January release on a misdemeanor 911 charge, and now conservatives across the country are pointing to that release as proof of the catastrophic consequences of soft-on-crime policies. If our judicial system is going to toss public safety aside in favor of ideology, then the predictable result is more victims like Iryna.
This case has sparked a political and legal backlash for good reason: North Carolina lawmakers moved quickly to pass what’s been called “Iryna’s Law,” tightening bail rules and reevaluating how repeat offenders are handled in magistrate courts. Conservatives have been screaming for years that cashless bail and catch-and-release practices amount to a public-safety experiment with ordinary Americans as the guinea pigs, and this tragic murder is the ugly proof that those experiments can — and do — get people killed. Lawmakers must stop posturing and start protecting citizens rather than placating activist lawyers.
Yes, there is a mental-health element here — Brown reportedly struggled with schizophrenia and homelessness, cycling between hospitals and jails without receiving sustained treatment — but that reality is not an excuse for leaving dangerous people on public transit lines. The system’s failure is twofold: it failed to provide proper, continuous treatment, and it failed to lock up a violent repeat offender who repeatedly forfeited bond and showed a pattern of dangerous behavior. Conservatives are right to demand more secure psychiatric facilities and to stop the revolving-door approach that releases criminals back into the same streets where they prey on innocents.
Justice must be swift and severe: federal prosecutors have already charged Brown with causing a death on a mass transportation system, and Attorney General officials are pursuing the maximum penalties available. But beyond prosecuting this single criminal to the fullest extent, this moment should force a national reckoning — tougher enforcement, accountability for judges and elected prosecutors who embrace soft-on-crime agendas, and funding for real mental-health care that keeps dangerous people treated and, when necessary, confined. America owes it to Iryna, her family, and every hardworking citizen who expects to ride a train or walk a street without fearing for their life.
