A blue city mayor who kneeled when George Floyd died in Minneapolis and penned an op-ed in the Charlotte Weekly to commemorate the 1-year anniversary of his death praised media outlets for not showing surveillance video of the brutal killing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in her own city. About Zarutska, she thanked media outlets for not showing the footage and claimed that "we can't arrest our way" out of crime committed by mentally ill homeless people.
Charlotte's Mayor is wrong on both counts. Lyles would never have been all in on Floyd if she hadn't seen the viral video of his arrest and she would have advocated for the publicizing of that video, not censorship of it. And the killer had been arrested—he just wasn't held. Instead, he was released without bond, scheduled for a psych evaluation that never happened.
One year after Floyd's death, Mayor Vi Lyles wrote "let's remember George Floyd and the countless others whose lives have been needlessly taken. Let's continue to work together to do everything we can to prevent any more of these tragedies from occurring." But just weeks after Zarutska's killing, she wants to brush it off, pretend it never happened.
But she'd rather forget Zarutska, a woman who was brutally stabbed to death by 34-year-old career criminal Decarlos Brown on a Charlotte light rail train on August 22. Video showing the stabbing was released over the weekend and the gruesome attack is shocking to watch.
"The video," said Lyles, addressing her real concern, "is now public. I want to thank our media partners and community members who have chosen not to repost or share the footage out of respect for Iryna's family."
It wasn't out of respect for the family that legacy media outlets didn't share the video, it was because they didn't like the narrative of a black man stabbing a white woman to death. When it's a white cop who gets the blame, like with George Floyd, they're happy to make a religion out of it. But when a black man, a criminal who should have been locked up under psychiatric care, is let free to roam and kill, leftist mayors and their lackeys do not want you to see it.
Legacy media was all over the case of Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely, where Penny restrained violent, homeless, black man Neely on a New York City subway. Penny was prosecuted for protecting people from the man who was threatening to kill him. Penny was painted as the villain while Neely was portrayed as a victim of a system that lacked the mental health treatment he needed.
The surveillance video shows Brown sitting behind her on the train taking out a knife, unfolding it, and stabbing her in the neck. "The train travels for approximately four and a half minutes before the suspect pulls knife from his pocket, unfolds the knife, pauses, then stands up, and strikes at the victim three times," police said.
She had no idea it was coming, there was no warning, nothing. She was heading home from work when her neck was sliced open and she lost her life. Her family said that she had moved to America to find "safety from the war" and that she was "hoping for a new beginning."
"Blood visibly drips on the floor as the defendant walks away from the victim. The victim goes unresponsive shortly after the attack. The defendant is the assailant on the video. There appears to be no interaction between the victim and defendant," said police.
Brown then walked around covered in her blood as other riders got out of his way. He tracked blood on the floor, took off his sweatshirt, and the other North Carolina straphangers moved around him, avoiding him, as Zarutska bled out. She fled a war zone in Ukraine only to be murdered pointlessly by a man who'd racked up dozens and dozens of charges and should never have been on the street at all.
Over the years, Brown was arrested for felony larceny, robbery with a dangerous weapon, communicating threats—most of these charges, from 2007-14, were dropped. He was convicted of armed robbery in 2014, serving 5 years, before being arrested upon his release in 2020 for assaulting his sister, property damage, and trespassing. In 2022, he was arrested for disorderly conduct. He was arrested just this year for abusing the 911 system by calling in and claiming there was "man-made material" in his body and he was released without bond. A psych evaluation was ordered but not carried out.
Lyles was clear that law enforcement couldn't have done anything to protect Zarutska. "We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health," Lyles said. "Mental health disease is just that — a disease like any other that needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence and commitment as cancer or heart disease."
Brown wasn't suffering from cancer, he was suffering from lax crime policies that allowed him to run wild in his community and kill people. He should have been kept off the streets and undergone the psych evaluation behind bars. Because Lyles was lying: we CAN arrest our way out of this, and we must.
That's exactly why the Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times, or other outlets barely covered it at all. The narrative of a white man killing a black man is one that the media outlets understood and were happy to cover because it plays into their notion that racism is the biggest scourge in America today. It isn't—unless you're talking about the racism in leftist newsrooms.
