The Meaning of Iryna Zarutska’s Murder

We don't have to live like this

Like many others I had a visceral reaction to the awful images of that poor Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska being murdered in cold blood on a train in Charlotte for no reason at all. In fact, I can’t remember a time in my life when I’ve felt as radicalized by a single event. For the last couple days I have been consumed by a mixture of emotions.

First, I feel pity and abject sadness for that poor sweet girl who had her whole life ahead of her, who fled a warzone hoping for a better life in America, who was building it up from scratch, working a service job and taking the train because she couldn’t drive yet. Murdered in the most vicious way, left to bleed out with no one to comfort her or render her aid in her dying moments. My heart genuinely breaks for Iryna. Her confused, panicked look of despair will stay with me for a long time. May God rest her soul.

My girlfriend tells me that she doesn’t take public transport in NYC for this reason. A female friend of mine was viciously beaten on the NY subway by a deranged homeless man, and no one stepped in to help. Anyone who has taken the subway a fair amount can relate to this. Criminals and mentally ill homeless people are permitted to roam around terrorizing ordinary people, and bystanders simply look away and avoid eye contact. The risks of intervening in a leftist city are huge; even if you can successfully subdue the threat, you will be shanghaied by the leftist judges and DAs and end up facing charges like Daniel Penny. So Americans have been conditioned to do nothing and hope the deranged lunatic moves on to their next victim.

Second, I am completely disgusted by the other passengers on that train that did absolutely nothing to help her. Not only did they not do a single thing to apprehend or confront her killer (this, I suppose, is understandable), but they didn’t rush to her aid. They slowly ambled away as if it was a minor inconvenience. She was ignored until her dying moment, after which some other passengers half-heartedly rendered aid, but it was far too late.

I of course feel contempt and hatred for her killer, Decarlos Brown, but it’s evident that he has no self-control or agency; to me he seems more like a stray pit bull liable to commit extreme acts of violence at any moment. This is not mitigating in any way of course. He should be swiftly put to death, which will unfortunately not happen. Most likely he will plead and get life with no parole rather than the execution that he deserves.

Third, I feel burning, utter hatred for the individuals in the legal and political system that were ultimately responsible for her death. This is not to take culpability away from the murderer Brown. But there exists a legal infrastructure painstakingly erected by the left in this country that gives carte blanche to such violent criminals. It consists of:

• Electing soft on crime district attorney and judges

• Promoting “cashless bail” (which is simply a euphemism for letting violent felons out on bail without asking them to put up any collateral)

• Efforts to defund police departments

• Nonprofits that fund bail for violent criminals and enable and support chronically drug-addicted homeless lunatics

• And apologists for all the above in government and the press

Why they do this, I will never understand. But these people are genuine enemies of civilization. As Sam Hyde said, “The world is not dying, it is being killed. And the people that are killing it have names and addresses.”

The people that made decisions that created the conditions for the murder of Iryna Zarutska are the following:

• Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes. She freed Brown in January 2025, seven months before he murdered Iryna. He had 14 arrests on his record, including for felonies such as larceny, armed robbery, and breaking and entering. Even though he was known to be a violent schizophrenic, she did not impose bail, house arrest, or require him to be involuntarily committed. Judge Stokes let Brown go free with a mere promise that he would return for his next court appearance. Imagine trusting the word of a psychotic 14-time arrestee and multiple time felon.
  

  Judge Stokes apparently never even passed the bar exam and is not a lawyer. She’s manifestly unqualified to be a judge. Serious questions must be asked of the institutional failures that allowed her to obtain a position of power. The other judges that also failed Iryna by continuing to let this violent reprobate roam free must also be investigated.

• Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles. She is responsible for the “Alternatives to Violence” program in Charlotte which “aimed to reduce violent crimes through community outreach”. She also spearheaded a $250m “Racial Equity Initiative” spending taxpayer funds in a futile effort to “address the root causes of inequality” rather than cleaning up the streets. Like many other Democrat mayors, she oversaw a massive spike in crime during the 2020 “summer of love” in which there were 118 homicides in the city, the highest in two decades.

• Former Governor Roy Cooper. Even though Cooper is claiming innocence, he oversaw the dismantling of legal infrastructure in North Carolina during his tenure by signing an executive order post-Floyd in 2020 creating the Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice.

Many folks on my corner of Twitter are talking about this as a kind of inverse George Floyd moment, in which Whites might find some sort of shared racial consciousness and begin to advocate for their rights as a unified group. Certainly violent crime in the US has an obvious racial overlay to it if you look at the data, which the left always ignores. But positive change can be made without a racial reawakening. We just have to find sense as a nation and roll back the disastrous “criminal justice reforms” the left has been pushing for decades.

One thing that Nayib Bukele showed us is that living in a high crime society – and the US is undeniably a high crime society, having the highest murder rate of any OECD nation – is a choice. We make the choice every single day. Our collective failure to live in a functional, safe society is simply due to a lack of political will. These problems are not hard in any logistical sense. Trump sent the national guard into DC causing crime and murder rates to drop. After a motivated effort, San Franscisco fired their communist District Attorney Chesa Boudin, improving things significantly. These things are possible, and frankly even trivial to implement. We don’t have to tolerate homelessness, open air drug marketplaces, or mentally ill felons making our public spaces unlivable.

The left constantly points out that violent crime has declined in the US since 2020. They even claim that violent crime is at “50 year lows” which of course is only credible if you believe that leftists aren’t cooking the books and underreporting crime. Focusing on relative rather than absolute levels of crime is also immensely stupid. First of all, crime is down recently because its regressing to the mean after the crime wave in 2020-21 set off by the George Floyd protests. Massive political pressure was exerted to defund law enforcement and make it impossible for them to do their jobs. It was the black community that was primarily victimized by this preventable crime wave, suffering around 30,000 excess deaths, which the left conveniently ignores.

But more saliently, America has astonishingly high rates of violent crime and murder for a rich nation – 5 to 6 times higher than other developed nations. It is zero consolation whatsoever to the victim of a violent crime that “rates are slowly declining in the aggregate”. The absolute level – the harm to the individual – is what matters. Not some abstract statistical decline. Even one preventable murder is too many. And Iryna’s murder was absolutely 100% preventable, with even the most basic rubric. We had more than enough cause to keep this schizophrenic felon off the streets for a long time.

Crime isn’t some vague concept which just happens to people randomly. It’s incredibly predictable! The simplest possible algorithm for whether someone will commit a violent crime is just… have they committed one before. The majority of violent felonies are committed by individuals with prior felonies. The DoJ found that 70% of homicide arrestees have prior felony arrests, and 50% had 3+ prior arrests.

I used to think that three strikes laws were unfair. You’d hear stories about someone put behind bars for 20 years for stealing a pizza. I no longer think this way. Violent crime is pareto distributed (give or take), so even a very simple 3 or even 10 strikes framework imposing long mandatory minimum sentences would eliminate a huge fraction of overall crime. According to Cremieux, five strikes would cut violent crime by 40%, and three strikes would halve it. And this would filter out anyone who simply made one bad mistake. Put simply, we are being tyrannized by a tiny majority of repeat, violent offenders, that are coddled and protected by the left.

The solutions to violent crime are incredibly simple, they just require political will to enact. All we have to do is roll back the idiotic “criminal justice reforms” put in place by the left:

• Rebuild mental hospitals and make a habit of involuntary committing violent lunatics

• Completely put a halt to NGOs funding criminals and drug-addicted homeless people

• End cashless bail

• Impose mandatory minimum sentences and reinstate 3 (or 10, or name your number) strikes laws

• Aggressively go after soft on crime judges and DAs

• Investigate and impeach judges that habitually impose lenient sentences on violent felons

And the last group I want to hear from is the “data-driven” centrists, who will surely try to use statistics to point out that Trump and Republicans generally are making a mountain out of a molehill, because “crime is falling”. The absolute level of violent crime is way, way too high. It’s multiples higher than any other rich nation. The socially optimal number of completely preventable violent crimes like Iryna’s murder is 0. And tolerating violent crime is 100% a Democrat thing, so it’s downstream from policy. Of the 20 cities in the US with the highest homicide rates, all but one have Democrat mayors. And of course if you try to defend yourself in a blue state you will find yourself prosecuted. We call this anarcho-tyranny.

I simply do not care that “violent crime is down year over year”. I care that the subway is effectively a no-go zone. I care that there are habitual drive-by shootings in the DC neighborhoods where I spent time growing up. I care that if I defend myself from a violent criminal in a blue state or city, I am the one going to jail. I care that my girlfriend, my female friends, and my sisters cannot safely take the subway in a blue city without being terrorized by antisocial lunatics. I care that the left believes utter fantasies about “rehabilitating” many-time offenders. I care that our wealthiest cities are absolutely beset by violence and disorder because we tolerate habitual criminality from drug addicts, the homeless, and repeat offenders. I care that brave law enforcement officers do their jobs, under great duress, and then district attorneys and activist judges fail to press charges or let these criminals out of prison. This has to end. Even though she will never appreciate it, I hope that Iryna’s death will not be in vain.