Charlotte, NC Mayor Vi Lyles says she’s disappointed that the video of the shocking murder of Iryna Zarutska “is now public” and thanked media outlets for not “sharing” the brutal footage.
Appalling: While Lyles now pretends the blackout was to show “respect for Iryna’s family,” her statement two weeks back to a local news reporter makes it plain her concern was for the vagrant arrested for the deadly stabbing.
Bull: Lyles wanted the video out of sight not because she cares for how the family feels, but because it exposes the corruption and menace that lurks right under the surface in our crime-ridden cities.
Iryna — a Ukrainian refugee who worked in a local pizza parlor — had only been seated on the Lynx Blue Line for four minutes before the deadly, utterly unprovoked stabbing.
The tape leaves little doubt that deranged ex-con Decarlos Brown Jr. did it; Lyles lamely claims he “appears to have suffered a crisis” and blames “problems with society safety nets” as she insists, “We will never arrest our way out [of] issues such as homelessness and mental health.”
Could we maybe arrest our way out of lunatics killing random victims on public transit?
Sure, get them help after you’ve brought them in; don’t substitute jails and prisons for more compassionate confinement — but don’t pretend leaving them running loose makes any sense at all.
Brown’s long arrest record describes a violent, serious mentally ill man who posed a clear threat to law-abiding innocents.
He served five years in prison for armed robbery starting in 2014, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and has been repeatedly arrested since then.
Well known to the local social service and community policing authorities, he was detained earlier in 2025 for repeatedly calling 911 from the mental hospital to complain that his brain was controlled by someone else.
A magistrate released him to the streets after he made a “written promise” to appear.
Brown’s own mother says her son is a danger to the community and should never have been left to roam free. His lawyer made the same plea to the courts last month, but the courts let him go anyway.
Mayor Lyles claims she’s “been thinking hard about what safety really looks like in our city” in the wake of Iryna’s murder.
Hmm: She claims the Charlotte Area Transit System is “by and large a safe transit system,” yet it makes no effort to snag farebeaters, as Brown of course was.
When leftist officials in blue cities talk about “real safety” and making people “feel safe,” it’s time to triple-lock your doors, because what they mean is more social spending, fewer arrests and less incarceration.
Lyles’ response to Iryna’s horrific murder is exactly that sort of feckless musing about safety.
Yet the true answer is obvious: Put criminals in prison, institutionalize the seriously mentally ill and fire the judges and elected officials who put the public at risk.
