A young woman sits alone on a train, looking at her phone while minding her own business. Behind her sits a man in a hoodie, minding his own business too. Until he’s not.
That’s when he suddenly wields a pocketknife, stabs her in the neck, and makes his way out barely noticed by the handful of other passengers. “I got that white girl,” the man, who is black, mutters as he gets off the train.
The girl, stunned and clearly not comprehending what’s occurred, looks up in terror, clutches her wound, and buries her face in her hands, crying in confusion and pain.
Then she crumples to the floor and dies.
It happened last month in Charlotte, North Carolina, though few knew of it until the video surfaced on social media two weeks later. And even then, much of America’s mainstream media underplayed the incident or didn’t mention it at all.
Which raises major questions regarding what’s going on in my native country. The most obvious, of course, is the racial aspect: imagine the media outcry had the roles been reversed, i.e. a hooded white man murders an innocent black woman muttering, “I got that black girl” in front of an assemblage of seemingly uninterested onlookers.
I don’t even want to think about it.
Second, and more disturbing, are the implications for law enforcement. It turns out that Carlos Brown Jr., the man charged with this heinous crime, had at least 14 previous arrests for offenses including felony larceny, breaking and entering, and robbery with a dangerous weapon. So how did he get out to murder 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on that train? Simply because a judge released him on “cashless bail” after determining he posed no threat.
Finally, and most troubling to me personally, are the issues surrounding mental health. Brown—diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia—stabbed Zarutska because he believed she was reading his mind, his sister told the New York Post. In a conversation following the murder, she said, her brother claimed alien “materials in his body” made him do it. Once he even called 911 to report that his brain was being “controlled by a microchip,” Tracey Brown recalled. Yet instead of providing mental health treatment, authorities arrested him for misusing 911.
“He just…broke,” she told the newspaper. “He couldn’t take it anymore.” Which deeply resonates with me as the father of someone suffering from the same mental ailment.
Back in 2006, my oldest son, then 18, began showing signs of grave paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Over the next decade, his mom and I fought tenaciously with America’s mental health establishment to get him treatment. But their overwhelming sentiment, both then and now, was that a person’s right to remain mentally ill vastly outweighs anyone else’s right not to be harmed by it.
And so, my poor son attempted suicide, endured drug addiction and homelessness, suffered from elaborate delusions, and ended up unconscious in intensive care with a brain bleed inflicted by someone he’d attacked. Eventually, it all culminated in a six-month jail sentence for beating and hospitalizing an innocent housekeeper. And it was only upon his release—with the help of influential friends—that we finally got him legally conserved and committed to a treatment center for help.
The reality, of course, is that most offenders don’t have that kind of support. And so, unfortunate victims like the poor woman on that train too often suffer and die.
From time-to-time quiet rustles of reform have rippled the status quo. President Trump recently signed an executive order expanding the involuntary treatment of those afflicted with serious mental illness. And just last week, the North Carolina legislature approved a measure limiting bail and ensuring more mental health evaluations for defendants charged with violent crimes.
It’s called, appropriately enough, “Iryna’s Law.”
Sadly, neither came in time to save the real Iryna’s life. Let’s pray they can save the lives of others in the future.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American author and journalist with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
