Another unprovoked attack on an unsuspecting victim using public transportation — this time on Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail — has been revealed to have been committed by someone suffering from untreated serious mental illness, and with a long rap sheet, including serving over five years in prison for armed robbery.
This time, 34-year-old DeCarlos Brown Jr., according to surveillance video, killed his victim, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old refugee from Ukraine, who sat in the seat in front of him, thus leaving her neck exposed for the knife he would stab into it.
Brown’s mother told local reporter Hunter Sáence that after his release from prison, “he started saying weird things.” She succeeded in getting an involuntary commitment order from the court. DeCarlos was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but was released after only two weeks. She had to kick him out of her home because of his increasing aggressiveness, and he became homeless.
He never should have been on that train. Sáence reports that local police “encountered him three times in 2024 and referred him to resources each time,” and “[i]n January, Brown was arrested for misusing the 911 system. Police say he called from the hospital and claimed someone gave him ‘man made material’ that controlled when he ‘ate, walked and talked.’ …. Magistrate Teresa Stokes allowed him to be released from jail on a written promise to appear. In court last month on this charge, his public defender questioned Brown’s mental capacity. Judge Roy Wiggins ordered a forensic evaluation.”
Sáence is waiting for answers to his questions about “what these resources are, if he accepted any of them, if police have any recourse if they keep encountering someone who refuses help and why Brown wasn’t arrested if he was accused of criminal activity.” Police were slow to give the public information, and Mayor Vi Lyles only issued a public statement from her office on August 26, the day after city council members demanded action at their meeting. As Stacey Matthews pointed out, Lyles spent one sentence on the victim and “several paragraphs about mental health and homelessness and how the homeless shouldn’t be stigmatized.”
Lyles offered familiar left-wing talking points: “We will never arrest our way out [of] issues such homelessness and mental health,” she wrote. She warned against “villainizing those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused.”
This crime actually happened five days before “transgender” Robert/Robin Westman fired into a Minneapolis Catholic church where school children were worshipping on August 27, killing two children and injuring 14 other children and three adults, before killing himself. Democrats, blaming guns, called for a national ban on automatic “assault” weapons. (RELATED: The Demons Have Taken Hold of Minneapolis)
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, like liberal media outlets, downplayed the fact that the mass shooter was “transgender” and mentally ill. Frey, when asked about the 23-year-old shooter’s recorded regrets about “transitioning” from male to female, similarly warned about “using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community.” (RELATED: Acknowledging the Relationship Between Transgender Identity and Violence)
In both Charlotte and Minneapolis, the mayors saw only a “tragedy” that ultimately came from social conditions. Both expressed more concern about stigmatizing murderers.
The acceptance of deviance, with trans rights activists likening their campaigns for shared bathrooms to those of blacks opposing segregated water fountains and claiming that opposition to drag queen story hours in public libraries is censorship, is part of a larger pattern of normalizing insanity. The people who think they are in the wrong bodies are like those who believe they are the Messiah.
The desire to “transition” is a “coping mechanism” often preceded by mental illness. It was only in 2013 that the American Psychiatric Association, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), “removed gender identity disorder as a diagnosis and replaced it with gender dysphoria,” which focused on relieving the “‘marked incongruence.’” Not long afterward, Jordan Boyd reports, came “gender affirming care” involving surgery and puberty-blocking drugs, which have been linked to an “increased risk of depression and suicidality.” Similarly, homelessness in the majority of cases is preceded by mental illness and/or addiction.
While schizophrenia remains in the DSM, the necessary actions to keep the victims of the disease and their victims safe have been just about eliminated.
While schizophrenia remains in the DSM, the necessary actions to keep the victims of the disease and their victims safe have been just about eliminated. It was not too long ago that on another train, in New York City, a drug-using homeless schizophrenic with a violent criminal past came on board. Unlike Brown, who only made disturbing head gestures and facial expressions, Jordan Neely was loudly making threats. Good Samaritan hero Daniel Penny wrestled him to the ground. (RELATED: The ‘Civil Rights’ Era Is Over. Good Riddance To It.)
When Neely died, prosecutors went after Penny. And mayors Lyles and Frey reflexively defended the perpetrators’ groups: the homeless and transgenders. Instead, they should be taking up President Trump’s recent actions aimed at keeping cities safe from the mentally ill.
How Did We Get Here?
Trump is reversing 1960s policies when an acceptance of countercultural deviance was accompanied by the closing down of state-run insane asylums. Deinstitutionalization was precipitated by the John F. Kennedy administration’s Interagency Committee on Mental Health and the Mental Health Retardation Facilities Construction Act. Congress then created 789 Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs), which received funding during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. But only 3.6 percent to 6.5 percent of those being released from psychiatric institutions were served by the CMHCs.
The bed shortage was made worse with the Institutions for Mental Diseases exclusion of the 1965 Medicaid law, which denied funding to facilities with more than 16 beds. The establishment in 1972 of the Supplemental Security Income program for the aged, blind, and disabled excluded state institutions. The misinterpretation by states and the Department of Justice of the 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. Supreme Court decision led to final closures.
The shuttering of asylums has created enormous societal problems. Those with untreated serious mental illness are more violent than others. They make up the majority of mass shooters — 63 percent. They make up about four percent of the population, but 13 percent of suicides. Lacking contact with reality, they engage in irrational, dangerous behavior and are 16 times more likely to die during an encounter with police.
A famous case from 2020 in Georgia involved Ahmaud Arbery — the so-called “jogger,” actually a two-time felon who suffered from untreated schizoaffective disorder that made him hear voices telling him to “hurt people,” and “to steal and rob.” He charged toward 34-year-old military veteran Travis McMichael, who was holding a shotgun as a “de-escalation” strategy as he tried to help the police apprehend Arbery for attempted burglary. After a George Floyd racial “reckoning” show trial, McMichael is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in a Georgia prison, as is his father, who accompanied him. The state of Georgia failed in treating and monitoring Arbery, who was on probation at the time of his death.
In North Carolina, Brown’s mother faced a psychiatric and governmental system that failed to treat and confine the seriously mentally ill. Stories abound about the frustrations parents have in getting the care their adult children need. The system essentially waits for a crime before acting. On the night of August 22, 2025, it was clear that they had waited far too long.
First Step to Sanity
But help is coming, with President Trump taking sweeping action through his January 28 executive order, “Protecting Children Against Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which prompted gender clinics across the country to begin reviewing, pausing, or ending “gender-affirming” care for minors.
Trump’s July 24, 2025, executive order, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” which calls for taking the mentally ill off the streets and into treatment programs appears to be the first step of Trump’s “Agenda 47: Ending the Nightmare of the Homeless, Drug Addicts, and Dangerously Deranged,” which he outlined in an April 18, 2023, statement. Trump’s policy is in agreement with that of DJ Jaffe and Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, both advocates of proactive treatment for the severely mentally ill, including involuntary inpatient or court-ordered and monitored treatment.
Trump’s executive order will, through the Department of Justice, roll back regulations that kept states and businesses from removing homeless people from the streets and use federal funding to incentivize officials to “enforce prohibitions” on open drug use and illegal occupation of public spaces.
Lisa Dailey, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center (founded by Dr. Torrey), anticipates “federal initiatives that will incentivize states to add facilities and staffed treatment beds.”
Time to Revisit Olmstead v. L.C.
John Hirschauer, writing in City Journal, describes how the executive order can help lead to the replenishment of bed space. The DOJ, he urges, should use its “investigative powers and its congressionally authorized role in interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).” A memo to states should clarify their interpretation of Olmstead v. L.C., which stemmed from a case in Georgia, in which two women with psychiatric and developmental disabilities sought to leave the public mental hospital where they had long resided. The move was supported by the state’s treatment professionals, given that they would continue to have supervised treatment. But because no such programs were apparently available, the hospital refused to release them.
The women sued the state, claiming that hospitalization violated Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Four years later, in 1999, the case made its way to the Supreme Court.
But states misinterpreted the decision to mean that they had to close facilities; they also faced pressures from previous Justice Department officials. Hirschauer explains, though, “The ruling effectively requires states to evaluate patients’ capacity to live in the community, offer qualified patients the opportunity to do so, and maintain a range of care options” for them. But it does not require states to close facilities.
The Trump DOJ memo should clarify that Olmstead does not require states to shutter, close admissions to, or prevent the construction of new facilities, “provided that states meet their obligations under the ADA.” Citing a case involving an individual who desperately sought care in an institution, Hirschauer says that the DOJ should tell states that Olmstead “does not prevent voluntary facility-based treatment, provided that community care remains available.”
“Finally, the DOJ should amend its binding interpretation of the ADA to allow states to pursue creative community-based approaches.” DOJ reform of the “definition of ‘integrated settings’ could enable providers to develop psychiatric services less restrictive than hospitalization,” such as farm programs.
While some who are seeking inpatient treatment are turned away because of a lack of space, others, who suffer from anosognosia, a brain dysfunction that does not allow one to recognize their own mental illness, require involuntary treatment, either in an institution or through court-ordered and court-monitored Assisted Outpatient Therapy. Trump’s executive order takes a step in this direction by not allowing the mentally ill to stay on the streets.
States also can follow the lead of New York S3007 for involuntary commitment, which, according to Dailey, is “a codification in statute of how New York’s courts have interpreted its criteria on what constitutes ‘danger to self.’” In New York, “danger to self” includes not only the threat of suicide, but also the inability or refusal to provide for one’s own “essential needs,” such as medical care and housing. Without such clear guidelines, “danger” is often interpreted as imminent danger, like showing a weapon.
President Trump’s executive order is the first step in taking the seriously mentally ill off our streets. Next, we need to put them behind protective walls, by force if needed.
The mayors of Charlotte and Minneapolis, and other cities, should be applauding and supporting President Trump’s efforts.
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