Attorney General Pam Bondi. Fox News/Reuters.
Suspect in the murder of Iryna Zarutska, who was murdered on a Charlotte North Carolina light rail car, now faces federal charges. Fox News. The case sent shockwaves throughout the country as a viral video showed the victim brutally attacked by DeCarlos Brown Jr., a career criminal with a long history of arrests. Now Brown is facing federal charges of committing an act causing death on a mass transit system. If convicted he could face execution for the crime. Brown also faces state charges for 1st degree murder and faces the death penalty in that case as well.
My Comment:
A necessary follow up to an important news story on a busy news day. Though obviously the revolution in Nepal and the Israeli strikes on Qatar would normally be the top story but a murder on a light rail car last month is the story that is going to have a more important and longer term impact over either of those stories, at least in the United States.
Why? Because it sure seems like there is going to be change due to this crime. To be fair, it's going to give cover to do what the Trump Administration wanted to do anyways, which is crack down on crime on the inner city, just like they did in Washington DC. They were probably going to do that regardless, but they have a very effective rallying cry in this horrible crime.
I mentioned in my last post on this that the attack when viral because the victim, Iryna Zarutska, was extremely sympathetic, while the attacker, DeCarlos Brown Jr. was extraordinarily unsympathetic. Some of this is due to the comparative backgrounds of the principle actors in this case, the victim was a beautiful war refugee coming home from work while the attacker was a career criminal that, in any sane society, would have been locked up, committed, executed or exiled.
Those comparisons got even more dramatic today as the full video of the attack was released, with only the stabbing itself blurred out. That video shows Brown stabbing Zarutska three times and the poor woman cowering in fear before dropping dead long before she even processed what happened to her. Brown can then be heard saying "I got that white girl" after the attack, suggesting a racial motive for the crime, as shocked onlookers seem incapable of acting. Due to the graphic nature of the stabbing and the unclear TOS on this website, I won't be posting the video here, but it is widely available on the internet. I'd recommend not watching it it really is soul crushing. Zarutska really looked like an innocent victim of crime that had no idea what was happening to her and her death was as sudden as it was heartbreaking.
The whole case is a microcosm of criminal justice in the United States today. Crime has long been a problem but the perception is that it certainly got worse after the 2020 summer of love. That year defunding the police became a rallying cry and another career criminal, George Floyd, became a martyr for resisting a lawful arrest and causing his own death. In short, we started to celebrate criminals, as long as they were the right skin color and this is the end result. The crime rate, as always, has peaks and valleys, and is always manipulated by the folks that collect the data, but the feeling of the country is that crime is out of control, largely because every time you see a crime like this it's by someone that has been in and out of jail for most of their lives.
And I think this is why this story is comparatively important as I think it marks the death of the Democrats focus on criminals. It certainly isn't the only case of inner city violence, I've covered many of those cases here in this blog and even then I missed thousands of them. But it certainly seems like the final straw. Nobody really understands why the Democrats support policies that allow folks like DeCarlos Brown Jr. to be on the street when they are clearly a threat to themselves and others. Things like cashless bail and other bleeding heart liberal priorities will likely see the ax soon enough. Either that or they will double down on yet another 80/20 issue and further destroy their chances in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential races.
We are also likely to see more deployments of troops to inner city crime areas like the recent one to Washington DC, which appears to have a fair amount of success. Chicago is already seeing some kind of enforcement action and it might just be the first of many cities. Will those deployments work? I am guessing so. It's hard to commit a serious crime when there are soldiers deployed everywhere. More importantly it sends a message to criminals. The Democrats may be soft on crime, but they aren't in power any more and right now, crime doesn't pay. That might cause at least a few of the more rational ones to give up crime, at least for the time being. It's a short term solution and what is really needed are new laws to repeal what the Democrats have been doing in terms of criminal justice and going back to something that works, or at least trying something different.
I also said that I thought the news media would be shamed into covering this story, and boy was I right. They could no longer ignore the case as it grew in prominence. When the President of the United States name drops a murder as a reason to launch a major political operation, it's certainly notable, which even means Wikipedia's effort to delete the article about the murder will fail. You can't put this genie back in the bottle now.
As for Republicans, it's clearly a strategy that they are going to focus on crime as a major issue for the lead up to the 2026 midterms, and it's clear why. Though crime has fallen a bit from the peak under Biden, it's still insanely high and the general perception is that the criminals that are out there are going to get away with it. By focusing in on this issue they are giving themselves a good blueprint for success.
Finally, having watched the video, I do want to say that I should defend the other people on the train. Many folks are asking how Brown was able to kill Zarutska without anyone stopping him, and the truth is that it happened so quickly that nobody could have done much. Like I said, Zarutska was dead before she fully understood what happened to her, so it's no surprise that the other folks on the train didn't really get it either. In a perfect world someone would have put down Brown before he finished his attack, but in a perfect world, the attack wouldn't have happened in the first place. Plus, it's illegal to bring a firearm into a Charlotte light rail car. Regardless, not everyone can be a hero and it all happened so quickly that I doubt even a trained police officer or solider could have prevented the attack or saved Zarutska's life.
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