A murder on Charlotte’s light-rail was the culmination of years of failure.
The sort of violence that took the life of a Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, on a light-rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, last month is impossible to make sense of. But that doesn’t mean that murders such as Zarutska’s are unpreventable. Her killing represents a confluence of failures within the structures meant to keep people safe. The country’s criminal-justice and mental-health systems should prevent exactly such incidents. But in recent years, these systems have been weakened, their efficacy deliberately reduced. No society can prevent all murders, but if these systems are restored, the prevalence of similar murders could be greatly diminished.
Such an effort begins with understanding more about Zarutska’s alleged killer, Decarlos Brown, and the checks that should have prevented him from perpetrating such violence. Brown was, according to reporting, a frequent offender, with more than a dozen prior arrests. Those include two violent felony convictions, for breaking and entering and armed robbery (the latter while on probation for the former), and two assault arrests, including one for attacking his own sister. In spite of this, Brown was, at the time of the murder, free without bond in an open case stemming from his January arrest for alleged misuse of the 911 system. Much of Brown’s behavior was likely related to his diagnosis of schizophrenia. He was homeless at the time of his arrest; his mother had evicted him because she considered him too violent. Lastly, Brown did not purchase a ticket before boarding the train.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Atlantic (paywall)
______________________
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is also the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most.
Photo by Ajax9/Getty Images