No One Helped. And It Was Over in 4 Minutes. Now What?

    “I got that white girl,” muttered Decarlos Brown, Jr. last month, as he walked down the aisle of a train, a bloody knife still in his hand. Behind him, 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska – a Ukrainian refugee on her way home from work – lay dying on the floor of the carriage.

    Brown had stabbed the defenseless Zarutska in the neck entirely unprovoked. Yet what shocks most about this gruesome murder in Charlotte, North Carolina is not just the savagery of the attack, but also the apathy of the victim’s fellow passengers. As the killer moved through the car, announcing what he had done, bystanders moved silently out of his way, averted their eyes and quickly gathered their belongings. Not one of them rushed to Zarutska’s side. Not one person attempted to save her life.

    To be fair, it may or may not have made a difference. While she did not die instantly, it was reported that her blood loss was quickly extensive. After Brown plunged a pocket knife into her three times, CCTV footage shows her curling in on herself and looking up at him in wide-eyed terror. When he moved away, she wept for several seconds into her hands before slumping to the ground. She continued to move for the next minute or so.

    Having witnessed all of this, men and women in the seats directly around her did nothing. They either watched on impassively or made for the exit. Perhaps they were experiencing a psychological ‘freeze’ response, whereby individuals become numb in the face of a threat.

    Two passengers did eventually move towards Zarutska during her final moments. One rested his hand on the back of her seat and stared. The other appeared to get a phone out to snap a photo. Suffice to say, they were not there to help – they were shameless gawkers who couldn’t even comfort a young woman as she died.

    We are told ours is an age of empathy. The response of passengers to Zarutska as she was attacked and then lay dying suggests otherwise. Their courage shriveled, they proceeded to either ignore her or engage in rubbernecking. It took a whole two minutes before a young man attempted to staunch her bleeding with his shirt. By this time, it was too late. It is possible that the last human touch this young woman felt was the hand that drove the blade into her.

    The horrific murder of Zarutska brings to mind that of the British soldier, Lee Rigby. In 2013, Rigby was hacked to death in the street in broad daylight by Islamist terrorists who proceeded to brag about what they had done in front of several passers-by. Over 60 people gathered to be no more than spectators and to film the incident. “They just wanted to watch and record the unhappiness of others,” said Ingrid Loyau-Kennett – a middle-aged mother of two, and the only person to confront the killers. Similarly, a dozen or so strangers must have witnessed Zarutska’s death. They were followed by the millions more who have looked at the footage and snapshots circulated online.

    This young woman deserved more than the indignity of having a phone shoved in her face as she lay curled up in pain. It is a profoundly sick society in which the urge to document our fellow human beings at their most terror-stricken should come before offering even the smallest gesture of support.

    In Iryna Zarutska’s final moments, she was surrounded by people, yet comforted by no one. 

    The video of Decarlos Brown, Jr., slaughtering 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light-rail train on that night is sickening in many ways, but one aspect of the horror was how mundanely it unfolded. All of us who have had to contend with chaos and danger on mass-transit systems since 2020 have created useful fictions for ourselves: “That wouldn’t happen to me, because I know not to sit near the crazy guy.” “I know to sit around other people.” “I know how to defend myself—punch someone, bite someone, scream.” The video demolishes these fictions. We have also had to contend with a related fiction: that our transit systems remain safe. It’s time we stopped accepting random murders on our transit systems as normal. 

    Zarutska, a refugee who arrived from Ukraine in 2022, gets on the train after her shift at a local pizza joint, just before 10 p.m. A slender woman, probably less than 100 pounds, she’s dressed in the khaki pants, black t-shirt, and black baseball cap of her employer, her blond hair tucked away in the hat. A few other people, at least four, are seated in her area of the train car; she knows, if she is calculating her public safety, that she is not alone. She finds a seat in the middle of the car, right in front of another passenger. She has no reason to avoid this young black man, Brown, 34, dressed in a hoodie, who, as she sits down, appears to be struggling to stay awake (he has been muttering and making jerky movements in the moments before she gets on the train). For more than four minutes after Zarutska takes her seat in front of Brown, he remains quiet. Even if she had looked behind her, or saw the man in her window’s reflection, she has no reason to fear him; he might appear fidgety, but lots of people fidget on the train. Zarutska scrolls through her phone, at one point nearly dropping it. She takes her glasses off at another point and tucks them into her shirt. Nothing out of the ordinary is going on here. Other passengers get on and off. The automated announcement tells people to “please stand clear” at a stop.

    Then Brown stands up, grabs Zarutska by the neck, and repeatedly slits her throat. The entire action takes less than four seconds. Zarutska looks up at Brown in seeming confusion as he walks away from her. She cowers into a fetal position on the seat, looking down as the blood spatters out of her onto the floor. She falls onto the floor in front of the seat, and you think, mercifully, that she is unconscious. But she’s not: her slender hand reaches up as she tries to grab her phone, most likely to try to ask for help. She appears conscious or semi-conscious for nearly a full minute as she bleeds out. Moments later, several passengers gather around Zarutska on the floor to try to help her, and to use their own phones to call police. 

    Zarutska had no chance of fighting back, and that would have been true if she were a man as well. What you also learn from watching this video is that you cannot depend on supposed safety in numbers to help you in an attack. The attack may happen too quickly for anyone to stop it, and the people around you may themselves be too confused, scared, or unsure of what to do to act instantly, even if doing so can save you. Brown faces state and federal charges. But the goal is to stop crimes from happening before we have to punish murderers. 

    Could Zarutska’s slaughter have been prevented? I have no idea. But here is what I do know; Brown should not have been on the train. He has spent most of his adult life under arrest or in prison, including for violent crimes. He also has a schizophrenia diagnosis, and has behaved so alarmingly, including assaulting his sister, that his own mother had him involuntarily committed, and then, when he was released, ejected from the family home. During a check on his health this past January, Brown called the police ON the police. In that case, instead of acting on the obvious danger of a person with a propensity toward violence suffering from delusions, a Charlotte judge released him on his own recognizance. Brown belonged in a mental facility. 

    The city of Charlotte’s initial reaction to this horror was to hope nobody would notice. Instead of pledging a full review of where her city, county, or state failed, Charlotte mayor Vi Lyles released as bland a statement as one could on the “tragic situation” and referred vaguely to “systems that should be in place.” She thanked media outlets for not running the gruesome video—as if running the video, and not the actual killing, were the problem. It wasn’t until the footage had chilled viewers around the nation that Lyles called the “murder” a “tragic failure by the courts and magistrates,” and said that we need a “bipartisan solution to address repeat offenders who do not face consequences for their actions and those who cannot get treatment for their mental illness.” I trust Ms. Lyles does the city of Charlotte a favor and refuses to run for re-election. 

    Much of the national press, though, prefers to spin Zarutska’s killing as a Republican plot to own the Democrats on crime. Axios, whose mission is to make its Beltway and business readers “smarter, faster,” had the “dumbest, intellectually slowest” take: “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’S crime message,” it headlined its story. Axios then tried to pair “feelings” with a “reality check”: “Democrats have accurately pointed out that violent crime rates have been decreasing since pre-pandemic highs,” it informed its readers.

    “Smarter” people may want to know the full story. The latest figures, through the end of 2024, show that the surge in national transit crime that began in 2020—mostly stranger-on-stranger unprovoked violence—hasn’t abated. From 2008 through 2019, an average of five people lost their lives to murder annually on American heavy-rail systems. Since 2020, the annual average has consistently been 15; last year’s 19 heavy-rail killings were the highest in at least 19 years. Between 2008 and 2019, the number of heavy-rail assaults nationwide averaged 315 annually; between 2020 and 2024, it averaged 728 annually. Across all U.S. transit systems, including light rail and bus, the annual pre-2020 average number of killings was 14; since 2020, it has been 40. The average annual number of assaults was once 836; now it is 1,687.

    These numbers obscure the fact that the rise in transit murders can’t be separated from a harder-to-measure increase in transit disorder. Many disturbed individuals board a train or bus screaming and yelling at other passengers but, thankfully, don’t murder anyone. However, they do make people feel less safe.

    The real answer to the question of whether transit violence is “low” is to see the video of a mute Iryna Zarutska watching herself start to bleed out. It is obviously not low enough. If we can prevent this horror—and we know that we can because we used to—shouldn’t we? If, as much media coverage seems to suggest, only Republicans care about transit violence, then some Democrats who watch the video will become Republicans.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com