Call the killing of Iryna Zarutska whatever you want. Just don’t call it an unavoidable tragedy.
It was avoidable in so many ways. So avoidable, in fact, that the relatives of the man accused in the Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail killing — a 34-year-old career criminal with a history of mental illness, Decarlos Brown Jr. — say he should have been behind bars.
And yet, despite the fact that he was charged with another crime — he had over a dozen prior court cases — a Charlotte judge let him free without bail.
Not only that, the mayor of Charlotte, Vi Lyles, has come out and said that “we will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health.”
Decarlos Brown’s relatives would beg to differ.
According to the New York Post, Brown’s brother Jeremiah blames the magistrate judge who let him out, saying that the Aug. 22 stabbing and murder could have been prevented had his brother not been walking the streets.
“I think they could have pretty much prevented it then,” Brown said.
“I didn’t even know he had mental problems… You can’t just let him walk free especially because of mental issues,” he added. “I think he should suffer the consequences.”
The 19-year-old Jeremiah, who shares a father with his brother, says he’s only met him “once or twice,” but was shocked to see that he was charged with the murder last month.
Should Decarlos Brown Jr. have been locked up?
However, he told the New York Post that his family has a history of violence.
“He was on my father’s side. They have a record of being in jail and stuff,” Jeremiah said. Both his father and older brother have done time — his brother for murder, as well.
“In a chilling parallel, Stacey, whose mugshot bears a striking resemblance to his murder suspect half-brother, took the Charlotte light rail to escape after the shooting,” the New York Post reported.
BREAKING: DeCarlos Brown Jr., who murdered Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, has a half-brother who murdered a 65-year-old man in a 2012 crime spree, a source revealed.
Stacey Dejon Brown pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 27 to 36 years. pic.twitter.com/QLAapsB6zI
— Julianna Frieman (@JuliannaFrieman) September 9, 2025
While Jeremiah may have known his father’s history, he didn’t know his brother intimately. Fair enough.
Then ask his mother, who knew the history well and wanted her son behind bars.
She said Brown had moved in with her after he spent five years in prison for robbery with a deadly weapon, but she was forced to kick him out due to his aggressive behavior.
“He started saying weird things,” she told local media, according to Newsweek. “He started saying that he wasn’t in his body.”
“The system failed him,” she added.
After his latest brush with the law — a January arrest which resulted from him calling 911 and saying a “man-made” substance was in his body and controlling his actions — Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes, a criminal justice and addiction activist, let him go with a “written promise to appear” in court, the Washington Examiner reported.
And here we have the left in North Carolina throwing up its hands, essentially saying: Look, what are we supposed to do until you kill somebody?
What’s amazing is that this story attracted as little attention as it did from the legacy media until authorities released the video of Brown allegedly killing Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee. And now that people are looking at the horror, we get headlines such as this one from Axios: “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message.”
Yes, how dare you MAGA folk pay attention to outrages? Don’t you know we can’t arrest our way out of mental health issues until they turn into murder or some other violent act? Just be quiet and stop using the facts to “fuel” your message.
This is a line of thinking that even Brown’s own relatives are rejecting. They think he should have been behind bars, too.
It’s one thing to listen to the family of the victim, but when even the family of the alleged perpetrator says that he ought not have been walking free, that should be a huge red flag.
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