Editor’s Note: This article discusses acts of violence, including murder.
As a North Carolina native, I’ve always considered my hometown to be quite safe. From morning walks to work uptown to relying on public transit for school, I grew up with the sense that the city was bustling, but never dangerous. So when I heard the news of the fatal stabbing of Iryna Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail on Aug. 22, 2025, I was at a complete loss for words.
The idea that a young woman could lose her life to a total stranger in such a brutal manner on a routine commute was shocking. I began to think about my own past rides on the light rail and the friends of mine who still rely on public transit every day. The randomness of it all left me unsettled, because it could have been me. It could have been any one of us.
Charlotte, like our own growing metropolitan area in Raleigh, has struggled to keep up with the social services its residents need.
Millions of people in our NC State community use local public transportation reminiscent of Charlotte’s light rail. While our on-campus transportation itself may be safe, Wolfline buses are often at capacity or experiencing delays, forcing many students to rely on city or Triangle-wide transport outside of NC State’s control.
It was later revealed that Decarlos Brown Jr., the perpetrator, had 14 prior run-ins with law enforcement, including shoplifting, armed robbery and breaking and entering. I never thought something like this could happen in North Carolina, in my own backyard. Ignorantly, I believed tragedies like these just didn’t seem possible here.
Zahni Spruill, a second-year studying baking and pastry arts at Johnson & Wales University, has been living in Charlotte since seventh grade. She says that although she doesn’t agree with harsh prison sentences, the city should take more action to prevent crime.
“He could just be a bad person, but I think that if somebody somehow continues to end up in a situation where he’s always in trouble with the law … the solution is not to just keep putting him in jail for a couple of months and then releasing him,” Spruill said. “14 run-ins with the law is a lot, so I don’t know what they’ve done before, but I know it’s probably the same consequence just repeated every time.
But the failure doesn’t stop there, how the justice system responds to repeat offenders like Brown also plays a critical role in maintaining our community’s safety. While rehabilitation efforts to reduce these patterns of repeated criminally offensive behaviors, the risk remains a major focus of research with its execution and is more often than not unsuccessful
Progressive prosecuting, which encourages alternatives to incarceration such as mental health treatment and reduced sentencing, falls through when resources for support are inadequate. It begs the question: were there missed opportunities to intervene effectively before the tragedy occurred?
Brown was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm in 2014. If federal prosecutors had taken the case, he could have received clearer supervisions which may have potentially prevented future offenses. Instead, the state dropped the charge in exchange for a guilty plea on a robbery charge involving a deadly weapon; this changed the class of crime at hand while also potentially impacting how its patterns would be understood regarding rehabilitation services.
Now, I’m not saying that Brown should have been locked up in a cage forever. Long-term incarceration often hardens people rather than helping them, especially those struggling with mental illness. However, upon release, we could have ensured proper resources were accessible and available for those experiencing challenges, like Brown, who may have benefited from years prior to the violence later observed.
This month, the North Carolina Institute of Medicine reported that the state’s mental providers meet only 13% of the mental health needs despite behavioral health disorders affecting 1 in 5 adults in North Carolina — ranking the state last in the nation for access to behavioral health care.
This cycle is especially dangerous when jails function as the only intervention for people with nowhere else to turn. Growing up in Charlotte, I’ve encountered people who had been homeless for years and have seen firsthand how they may be repeatedly arrested for minor offenses like loitering, only to be released with no opportunity to prevent the situations from recurring through available temporary housing.
Resources for those facing homelessness, mental illness or repeat offenses are either limited or not given at all, causing individuals to slip through the cracks in our society. This does not mean that either Brown’s mental health conditions or housing status were responsible for causing the August offense, but parallels between his situation and others in our own community are evident.
While this brutal act of violence on the light rail feels unprecedented, it is the consequence of pre-existing judicial and societal failures. If we want to prevent potential tragedies in our own community, patterns need to be addressed and responded to before they have the chance to escalate further.
