


The man accused of murder in the caught-on-video killing of a woman that’s shocked the country claims it wasn’t his fault.
In a recording of an Aug. 28 conversation at the jail, reported by the U.K.’s Daily Mail, Decarlos Brown Jr. told his sister that “materials used in my body stabbed the lady.”
“You know that’s not me,” Brown said.
Brown is facing state and federal charges in the brutal stabbing death of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old war refugee from Ukraine.
The two were aboard a light-rail public transit line in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the night of Aug. 22 when the utterly unprovoked attack occurred.
Brown can clearly be seen on surveillance footage drawing a knife from his pocket, standing up behind Zarutska, who was scrolling through her phone — apparently oblivious to his presence, then stabbing her.
But to hear Brown tell it, he had no role in the killing.
“The material used in my body stabbed the lady,” Brown said.
His sister, Tracey Brown, asked, “I’m just trying to understand, out of all people, why her?” Brown had no intelligible answer.
“Hey, it, I don’t have nothing,” he said.
“They just lashed out on them, that’s what happened,” he said. “They lashed out on her …
“Whoever was working the materials, they lashed out on her.”
“Now they really gotta investigate what my body was exposed to … Now they gotta do an investigation as to who was the motive behind what happened,” he said, according to the Daily Mail.
After first being greeted with mainstream media silence, the Zarutska killing has become a national flashpoint.
President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a strong interest in the crime, and Trump himself on Wednesday called for the death penalty in the case.
Tracey Brown, meanwhile, told the Daily Mail that her brother’s mental illness is to blame for the killing.
Decarlos Brown was released from prison in 2022 after a five-year prison sentence for armed robbery, according to the New York Post.
Tracey Brown told the Daily Mail in an interview that her brother had been mentally ill since at least his prison release — and that he had tried to have himself admitted to mental care several times.
“I strongly feel like he should not have been on the streets at all,” she said, according to the Daily Mail.
“I’m going to be honest. I’m not blaming anyone for his actions, except for the state. I’m blaming the state for letting him down as far as seeking help.
“When you have mentally ill people seeking help, and you’re running tests on them, and you clearly see that you are dealing with a psychosis on an acute level, you do not let them go back into society.”
Her brother, she said, is one of those people.
“He was a high risk. He was not in his right mind. He was not safe for society,” she told the Daily Mail.
“We know what he has been dealing with the last three years. And now an innocent woman is dead.”
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